A Couple of Nice Little Houses

Chiswick House

As I have mentioned before, last year was marked by rather more frequent trips to London than usual for family reasons, and we also enjoyed a year's membership of English Heritage, so when we've visited our family we have usually stayed a mayor two extra and visited some of the London properties managed by this state heritage organisation. In October we stayed near our family at the Brook Green Hotel, Hammersmith, which I thoroughly recommend, by the way, and visited a couple of houses in west London while we were there, one in Chiswick, the other at Hyde Park Corner, both with interesting histories.

Apsley House

Our trip began as usual with a train from Stamford, and a change at Peterborough, but rather later than usual as it was a Sunday and we could not get away until the evening. The Brook Green Hotel kindly arranged for us to check in later than usual, although our trains were actually well on time and we were earlier than anticipated. The Hammersmith & City Underground line was closed for weekend engineering work and we had to travel by the Piccadilly tube line instead: Hammersmith has stations on both lines, opposite one another in the town centre, so it does not make much difference, but the Hammersmith & City is mostly on the surface and makes for a more interesting journey in rather bigger carriages. A short walk to the hotel and check-in. Very friendly staff, nice room with view over Brook Green, the urban oasis which makes this part of London such a pleasant place to live.

Café at Chiswick House

It is always worth checking opening times for historic houses etc because they are commonly closed on one or more days per week; they have to do their cleaning and maintenance some time, so the "tourist" section of our itinerary was built around when our planned destinations would be available for a visit. We have the English Heritage app on our iPhones and were able to plan our days over the wonderful Brook Green Hotel breakfast, including planning the travel there using the Busmapper app. And so, after breakfast we toddled down to Hammersmith bus station and sought the departure bay for service 190 which would take us almost to the gates of Chiswick House. The grounds of the house are a public park, open year-round free of charge, and are well-used by local people; plenty of dog-walkers in evidence and lots of people casually using the café, which, incidentally, is a worthwhile piece of modern architecture itself.

The current house seen from a point in front of where the
original house stood

The "house" is actually just one wing, built by the 3rd Earl of Burlington in the Palladian style for entertaining visitors and contains no real facilities for dwelling. It was inspired by the Mediterranean architecture he encountered on the Grand Tour. An audio guide leads visitors around and explains the history of the house, including the long-demolished parts. Well worth a visit, and with the grounds freely available it is possible to see the exterior before deciding whether to come in. The bus ride there from Hammersmith was easy (we followed the route in real time on bus mapper so we knew where we were and when to get off) and passes the famous Fullers brewery. Chiswick station is a half-mile walk and if we'd been coming here from home, that is probably how we'd have come.

The other place we visited involved a bus trip in the other direction towards central London, and we began, the following day, with a walk along Brook Green to the bus stops for eastbound services along Kensington High Street, alighting (as they say in bus and train jargon!) at Hyde Park Corner. There to our left was Apsley House and to our right, on a traffic island, a statue of the Duke of Wellington and the arch commemorating him. Notable for his victory over Napoleon, we has also Prime Minister for some time and had Apsley House extended to make a comfortable London home. Even after extension it is still not huge: the neighbour over the road is Buckingham Palace, and that is huge.

In this house and at the Wellington Arch, also an English Heritage property, I learnt a very great deal about the politics of the Napoleonic era and the Battle of Waterloo, and the adulation in which the victor was held afterwards. Showered with gifts from all over Europe, Apsley House is as much as anything a museum in which to keep them all, and now they are available to anyone who cares to pay to visit the house. It is worth crossing the road, on the level or by subway, to visit the Wellington Arch, too: the exhibition space inside is small but the view from the top is well worth having. I have driven and been driven past this so many times and have never really given it a second thought before.

By the time we'd walked around these two places and between them we needed something to drink and there was no café or bar anywhere near, but we were on the edge of Hyde Park and walk through there soon brought us to an excellent café-restaurant on the side of the Serpentine and were we stopped for a snack and a drink before strolling on through Hyde Park to Kensington Gardens.

We paid a quick visit to the Albert Memorial on Kensington Gore: again, this is something I had passed very many times but had never really looked at, and it is well worth a visit. From opposite there we caught a bus back to Hammersmith and our hotel.

In due course I shall publish the photographs of the memorial on Flickr: there are far too many to show here.



We returned home from London on the 20:35 train from Kings Cross, the last on weekdays that gives a connection for Stamford, and after the usual First Class refreshments were home in time to unpack and still be in bed at a decent time, ready for what the next day would bring. On this trip to London we had used the Underground only for getting there and back: all our travel within London for our visiting had been done by bus. We did this because it was the most convenient in the circumstances, but it did have the bonus of allowing us some great views as we moved from place to place, too. Thoroughly recommended!

Rum and Submarines

Unlike most of the stories in my weblog, this one does not start from home. We were on a motoring holiday in Cumbria but, always on the lookout for an interesting day out by train, we fitted in a grand day out on the Cumbrian Coast line. As so often in the north-west of England the weather was patchy and rained at times but it did not spoil a good day out which took in hills, valleys, the sea, lots of history and two gauges of railway. It was not a fast journey and although comfortable was not luxurious, and we saw some coast not easily accessible by road

The erstwhile seafront at Grange Over Sands:
a westbound train is leaving the station

We were staying in Grange-Over-Sands, an interesting place in itself, for it has all the hallmarks of a seaside town including an esplanade, although the swimming pool on the esplanade had recently closed when we were there. But there is no beach. The course of the river which flows into the bay had changed and the erstwhile beach silted up and became salt marsh, so the view from all the seafront installations is of mud and grasses, grazed by sheep, rather than sand with deckchairs.




Our daughter joined us for a few days, arriving by train from London with a change at Lancaster. The station at Grange is charming, a great gateway to what had been a great beach resort and is still a very pleasant town in which to spend a holiday, so long as it is not a beach holiday you want. A couple of days later we made our way back to the station to catch a train through to Whitehaven. We chose that destination because it gave us a decent trip up the coast with a worthwhile amount of time there before catching a train back. Sandwiches and drinks were bought from the little shop at the station, along with postcards for sending home in due course.

Laurel and Hardy Monument in Ulverston

By and large the railway hugs the coast, our train stopping at all the stations - right through to Carlisle for those who stayed aboard long enough. Along the southern stretch of the line through Grange there is also a service to and from Manchester Airport as far as Barrow-in-Furness, a town which once had through trains to and from London when its steelworks and shipyards were more significant than they are now. Soon after leaving Grange the train leaves the coast briefly to cross the Cartmel peninsula then crosses Cartmel Sands, an estuary fed by rivers from Coniston Water and Lake Windermere. The towns of Ulverston (home town of Stan Laurel) and Dalton-in-Furness are also away from the coast and then the line loops right round to call at two stations in Barrow-in-Furness, adding two or three miles to the journey in order to serve the most significant town on the line. The shipyards at Barrow have lately been used for the construction of submarines and have long been an important employer in the area, but this is also an area with a lot of history, abbeys, castles and other historic buildings and ruins are to be found in some number, and a dock museum.

From Barrow-in-Furness our train headed north along the east side of Duddon Sands, the estuary of the River Duddon which rises high up in the Furness Fells near Scafell Pike. Crossing the estuary the train then headed south along the opposite side, turned west at Millom towards the Irish Sea coast and  then made a more-or-less straight run northwards. North of Seascale the line is very close to the sea which was grey and foreboding on the day of our trip, certainly atmospheric as we paused at the station at Sellafield, adjacent to the famous nuclear power station and reprocessing establishment. A nuclear waste flask train was waiting in an adjacent siding.

Just before Whitehaven we missed the sea again as the train crossed a headland and plunged into a tunnel to emerge at Whitehaven station, where we left the train and walked the short distance into the town centre. There was some drizzle when we arrived in the town but it soon passed. Whitehaven, like so many other places here, had been through some difficult times but was keeping its head above water economically, with some signs of new businesses and facilities, and the station itself was fairly new. My daughter and I visited a rum museum, Rum Story, and I learnt more about rum, sugar cane, and trade with the Caribbean than I realised there was to learn.

Leaving Ravenglass for Dalegarth

Soon the time came to make our way back, and we broke our journey at Ravenglass and took a ride into the hills on the narrow-gauge Ravenglass & Eskdale Railway. By now the weather was slightly better but as we climbed into the hills on the little train there was a slight mist which obscured the distant view. The little train seemed to make light work of the climb up the former mineral line through woodlands and small villages.

Train standing at Dalegarth

At the Dalegarth terminus those passengers with more time (and more energy) walked off into the hills. The train crew had a cup of tea and ran the locomotive round the train for the return trip.

We just watched the locomotive run round the train and rode back down to Ravenglass to have tea in the café await our train back to Grange-Over-Sands.

View towards Seascale and Sellafield from Ravenglass as
train approaches. The track in not really that rough - this
is an effect of the telephoto lens!

From Ravenglass mainline station there was a great view of the Sellafield complex in the distance and soon our train came into view and picked us up for our ride home. On the way back we sat on the left, inland, side and looked across at the hills, having seen the sea on the way out. The train paused for a while in the rather pleasant little station at Barrow-in-Furness and then we were off eastwards along the north side of Morecambe Bay until we reached our temporary home at Grange-over-Sands for dinner. It had been a grand day out!

The Meeting Place

When St Pancras station in London was refurbished for its new rôle as the terminus for high-speed services to France and Belgium via the Channel Tunnel, the traditional meeting and greeting place under the big clock was enhanced with a fabulous sculpture by Paul Day. The work is dominated by an embracing couple, he obviously British, she probably French, meeting (or saying farewell) above the heads of people eating and drinking at the pubs and cafés around them, and if we can just spend a little time here rather than rushing on by as if we have a train to catch - for there is much more to do at St Pancras these days than merely catch a train, even an international one - we can see much about the history of this station and the people who have used it in war and in peace in the carvings under the couple's feet.

Here are some of my photographs. I shall not comment on them but leave readers to imagine their own commentaries. I have some personal favourites among the sketches seen here but would not want to spoil anyone else's enjoyment by seeming to suggest that you might like these too.