Not West Bridgford No. 14

For the time being, this will be the last of my “Not West Bridgford” posts, and it relates to the longest, straightest road in West Bridgford. There are several contenders for this dubious honour, among them Harrow and Repton, Stamford and Davies, and Alford Roads, and also Trent Boulevard, but the longest of them all, stretching almost one and a half miles, dead straight (laterally, though with significant gradients here and there) from Trent Bridge cricket ground right up the hill almost to Sharphill Woods, is Musters Road. It encompasses the entire social strata of the suburb, wealthy towards the top, less so in the lower regions, with chapels, schools, medical practices, tennis courts and retirement homes along the way. A few shops at the Trent Bridge end. Formerly it gave its name to a Senior School (now demolished and replaced by a health centre) and an Infants’ School (now renamed).

 
Especially in the lower stretch, between Bridgford Road and the traffic lights at the oblique junction with Melton Road, Musters Road offers a few architectural quirky bits, primarily of a turrety nature - the sorts of polygonal protuberances in which might reside creative types and other eccentrics. 

The photograph above is of an admittedly rather dull and contrived turreted building, surely not one that would appeal to the genuine sufferer from Turrets Syndrome, but my excuse is that it isn’t in West Bridgford at all. No, it’s towards the western end of Colwyn Bay, heart and soul of the North Wales Riviera. However, it’s very much the sort of structure that might one day get built in Musters Road. What you can’t see, off the picture to the right, is the sea, but this at least allows us to leave this series of silly blog postings with the pleasant fantasy of West Bridgford on Sea.

Metro Memes

I’ve never been very struck on the idea of the meme, which has always seemed to me to be a somewhat overblown conceit for a natural and obvious aspect of concept formation and knowledge transfer that happens all the time. Attempts to draw parallels with genes seem to me to be strained in the interests of a snappy term that ought to be useful, but somehow doesn't quite work out. As an information scientist I would have expected discussions of memes to feature prominently in the professional literature, but evidently they don’t. I'd rather come to the conclusion that it was just a word contrived to draw an audience to its apparently intellectually sophisticated users, a word saying "look at me me ...me".

 

However, this week I was in Brussels and – intending to explore the exhibition grounds of Heysel, the most famous feature of which is the Atomium, supposedly representative of an iron atom – I decided to take the Metro from the Midi (or Zuid) station. A nice lady at a kiosk sold me a Brussels Ticket for 7.50 euros, valid all day anywhere on the system, and I followed the signs towards Line 6 and the platform for its terminus station - anglicised as King Baudoin. I was confronted with a line of ticket gates, but my ticket, which was a piece of card bearing a magnetic strip, wouldn’t work. Passengers came with Oyster-type cards, scanned them and were admitted to the system. There were no Metro staff to ask. Panic and annoyance. Recollections of George Tooker paintings of anxiety and entrapment on the New York Subway.

To cut a long story short, as well as several devious but unsuccessful attempts to beat the system, which must have been highly amusing to anyone watching the CCTV monitors, I asked a smartly dressed commuter for help. He led me to the last two ticket gates, alongside which were small red devices. Into one of these I inserted my ticket; it was swallowed briefly, read, and regurgitated, the gate opened, and I was on my way.

 
A couple of hours later I was back at the very same spot, and encountered a young oriental guy with a ticket similar to mine, wandering around looking very confused. With pride, confidence and a strong sense of international altruism I showed him what to do, and he was suitably grateful. So, I wondered, is this how knowledge of how to enter the Brussels Metro is passed on? Is this how you beat the Belgians at their own game? Normal processes of intuition or familiarity with similar systems in other parts of the world were clearly of little help. Had I discovered an unusual species of delayed-reaction meme, or just the consequences of an enthusiasm for a not properly-thought-through technological zeal? I would like to think that some hours later our oriental friend returned to the Midi/Zuid station and was able to forward his newfound competence to the next grateful beneficiary. And so on.

Not West Bridgford No. 13

West Bridgford was relatively unusual in that for a place of its size and population it never possessed a railway station, although until after the legalised vandalism inflicted upon the nation by the infamous Dr Beeching the Midland main line passed right through the heart of the district. There was a minor halt some distance to the south at Edwalton, but the reasonable idea that there should be a station just five minutes’ walk from Central Avenue was never taken up. Passengers on the route from Nottingham Midland to London St Pancras via Melton Mowbray, Oakham, the Harringworth viaduct, Corby and the regular main line from Kettering southwards could enjoy a good view of the suburb, but never the convenience of local access.

For much of the route through West Bridgford the Midland Railway was carried on an embankment, with girder bridges across the Trent (now the Lady Bay road bridge), the Grantham Canal, Radcliffe Road (with a prominent Ferodo advertisement) and Bridgford Road, and brick arch bridges over Rectory Road, Melton Road and Devonshire Road (the only one of these arch bridges to survive to the present day, now carrying a footpath along the old trackbed) and a couple of minor bridges over footpaths in the vicinity of Stratford Road. Boundary Road and Melton Road, higher up, also had brick arch bridges which crossed over the railway line deep in its cutting through Edwalton hill.

The bridge over Bridgford Road, adjacent to Millicent Road and to the playing fields (now called Bridge Fields and used as an overspill car park for major cricketing events at Trent Bridge), was a skew girder span erected in the 1930s, replacing an earlier structure. Bridgford Road made a slight dip to allow the double-deckers on the No. 21 route to pass beneath this bridge, and there were lampposts there of reduced height. The bridge was demolished in 1980. The illustration, above, is Not Bridgford Road Bridge, but a rather similar one, with the same kind of extreme skew, situated in Eden Park (the subject of an earlier blog post in this series), south of Beckenham, in south-east London.

Not West Bridgford No. 12

The previous “Not West Bridgford” featured the Wirral seaside commuter town of West Kirby. Strangely, or not, this present piece takes as its subject matter the neighbouring resort of Hoylake. The picture is a view along Alderley Road, one of several side roads that lead from Market Street, the main commercial thoroughfare, to the seafront. Naughtily, in the interests of increased “Not West Bridgfordness”,  I’ve left-right inverted the picture, which in any case was obviously not taken in WB – the domestic architecture, for one thing, is a dead giveaway.

 
However, down at the junction with Market Street a pair of peculiar buildings are oddly reminiscent of the arrangement of the Methodist and United Friary churches in Musters Road, West Bridgford, as seen from the west, along Patrick Road.

In the Paws of the Fat Controller

The news this week that electrification of the Midland main line between St Pancras and the East Midlands is to be “paused” - because of planning and budgeting cock-ups blamed on Network Rail - is disappointing, since travel times on this line have long been unimpressive compared with most of the other main lines radiating out of London. The East Midlands deserves better.

In the late 1960s, when I first started using this route regularly, typical journey times between the capital and Nottingham were around 1 hour 50 minutes, and a regular highlight of evening northbound journeys was the sight of former deputy leader of the Labour Party, George Brown, who was the MP for Belper, propping up the bar, or attempting to, on the way back to his constituency. Today’s journeys are less fun, almost half a century on, with travel times down only slightly, to around 1 hour 40 minutes, or even 1 hour 35 on a good train (and a good day). Electrification seems hardly worthwhile if it is only going to shave another 10 minutes off the total journey time, and “Nottingham in Ninety” could easily be achieved today, with a little effort, especially if the faster trains missed out stops at Market Harborough and East Midlands Parkway.

Yes, “East Midlands Park”, as the electron-sparing dot matrix display in train carriages puts it, or as BBC News described it this week - “a station built in the wrong place”. Well, it wouldn’t be if a regular, dedicated shuttle bus service ran from there to East Midlands Airport and if, rather than London trains wasting time routinely calling there, frequent local services from Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Sheffield did so, many of the airport’s customers originating from within this catchment area. Someone needs to decide whether it’s supposed to be a park and ride station for London traffic, or a link to the airport. It can be both, but if it includes the latter function, then well-meant suggestions for extended tram routes, including one to the proposed ludicrous HS2 “hub” at Toton, are unnecessary. All the station has ever needed was a little joined-up thinking in the form of a couple of buses with adequate luggage space. EMP to EMA in 10 minutes. Free to anyone with a valid rail ticket. Sorted.

So, yes, the “pause” is bad news, as is anything that frustrates the reduction of time spent in the company of East Midlands Trains, with its shrill, unwelcoming, tediously detailed announcements about the penalties to be incurred should one be travelling with an inappropriate ticket or pass (something which the excellent Victoria Coren-Mitchell complained about in an article many years ago – the inflexible attitude has changed little since), the bizarre electronic beeps that disturb one’s snooze or one’s thoughts when travelling on Meridian trains (with their badly-designed view-blocking window “pillars”), the practice of trains that are being “terminated” at Nottingham doing so as far away as possible from the passenger exits, and the way in which passengers are prevented for ages from boarding at Nottingham or St Pancras, even though their train has already been “platformed” for some time, and is sitting there evidently ready for business. The Midland line isn’t, when all said and done, in comparison to frequencies on other routes, busy. Nor can it appear passenger-friendly. I dread to think what travellers from overseas make of it - especially if they have just arrived at St Pancras by Eurostar and are used to the professionalism of most European rail companies. The expression “a bit of a come-down” doesn’t really do justice to the concept.

Such a visitor to Britain may, one imagines, sometimes (but these days not often) possess a less than fluent knowledge of the English language, and be innocent of the minutiae of ticketing rules and regulations, while being confidently familiar with an alphabet which, with a few minor variations, underpins all western European languages. On board their train, this confidence may soon be shattered, for as they journey north through the green and pleasant English shires they are more than likely to be hectored repeatedly that “owing to a short platform at Market Harborough, passengers in coaches X, Y, M and D are requested to move forward to coaches A, E, N and Z in order to alight from coach S for Stupid, sorry, that should be walk backwards to coach B for Barmy, as coaches Q, H and R for Ridiculous will not be platformed at Market Harborough owing to Market Harborough having a short platform at Market Harborough. This service is now arriving into Market Harborough. The next station stop will be Leicester”.

“Pliz, what is Makket Arbo?”

 
Thus it is disappointing that the minimising of one’s exposure to this kind of experience is to be delayed. One hopes, probably in vain, that the funds can be re-allocated to something useful, like lengthening the platforms at Market Harborough and Beeston. Best of all, this belated “discovery” of inadequate finances might encourage the scrapping of the whole misguided delusion known as HS2. However, while awaiting such a happy outcome, breathing should not be paused.