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.