Not West Bridgford No. 1

One of the most characteristic features of English suburbs, wherever they are, is the shopping parade. Often dating from between the wars, of from the immediate postwar era, many were built with service roads alongside main thoroughfares. Various regional and historical styles were adopted, with watered down Georgian being popular, as was black and white half-timbered, usually described as Tudorbethan or even Tudor. The “Tudor” cinema was a classic example, in the heart of West Bridgford, and with a surprisingly short lifespan, just thirty years, from 1931 to 1961. I was lucky enough to visit it maybe half a dozen times, on one occasion on a school trip to see “The Inn  of the Sixth Happiness”. Along with most other suburban cinemas in Nottingham the “Tudor” became a victim of the success of television.

The fate of the “Tudor” cinema, with its steeply gabled A-frame frontage and its “goth-Tudor” neon sign (it would have been so at home in Los Angeles, and so would I), was to disappear in a pile of rubble, shortly to be reconstructed as a Fine Fare supermarket and adjacent inspirational gems of 1960s “architecture”. Its name survives in Tudor Square, the anything but square road junction (then unnamed)  where it stood, so irregular in shape that to this day it has withstood the installation of traffic lights, which it badly needs, and in Tudor Road, a nearby new thoroughfare of bland housing. The Tudor style, however, is replicated in odd places in West Bridgford and, it must be admitted, elsewhere in the Nottingham area, and in suburbs just about anywhere. It appears, for instance, in the design of shops, houses, and garages both private and commercial.

Elements of the style can be found less than a mile from Tudor Square, in a short parade of shops in Loughborough Road - an area sometimes referred to as The Wolds – and opposite a now much-mangled 1930s pub that used to be called “The Wolds”, a watering hole favoured by those returning from a good send-off at Wilford Hill.cremmie, further up the road. And presumably not by those not returning …

The accompanying photo is a lot like the Loughborough Road parade of shops (I’m not including the originals for comparison in any of this series), but it isn’t. It’s my first example of Not West Bridgford. The location is in fact in Eden Park, in south-east London, roughly half way between Bromley and Croydon. The 020 phone number is a dead giveaway but, well, you have to use your imagination a bit.

Introduction to 'Not West Bridgford'

Like jokes, paintings are probably best left unexplained. And like many other creative endeavours, it’s often the case with paintings – at least in my experience – that the ones destined to succeed are completed relatively swiftly and painlessly. The troublesome ones requiring endless alteration and fiddling around with are usually, though by no means invariably, those that are never going to be any good.

One of my favourite recent paintings, currently on show at Bingham library, Notts., that (a) needs little explanation, (b) proceeded easily to completion, and (c) appears to have succeeded, is “Road near the park”.

 

“Road near the park” (greyscale version), © R. Abbott  2015

 

The road in question is Edward Road, near its junction with Crosby Road, and the park is Bridgford Park, in West Bridgford, Nottingham. Visiting the location last autumn I was immediately entranced by the scene, by the angles of the roads, the sunlight on the brickwork, and the tall telegraph pole with its characteristic little curly spike on the top, one of my earliest fetishes of street furniture. Instantly I knew that I had walked into a successful picture, so I took a photograph for reference, and the painting followed speedily and with little effort.

The location is within half a mile of my childhood stamping ground. The road in which I grew up was once described by the local evening paper as being typically suburban, though now I cannot recall whether this judgement was deemed favourable or not. From my perspective I am happy to be associated with such a background, and while aware of the popular sneers against suburbia, I see little that is fundamentally wrong with this component of the urban environment; after all, statistically, suburbs are where most of us live.

Many years of travelling around, in the UK and elsewhere, have widened my knowledge of suburbs, of how and why they came to be, what they look like, how they feel. More than a few, I’ve discovered, remind me of West Bridgford. Several  years ago I had the whimsical idea that it would be fun to put together a small exhibition of images that would be called ‘Not West Bridgford’, photographs of places that looked like West Bridgford, but weren’t. Ideally, I imagined that the exhibition would be a physical collection of photographs and explicatory text, perhaps held in the local public library. Perhaps one day it will be, but for the time being I am proposing something more modest.

 
Instead, therefore, I am planning to post images from this ‘Not West Bridgford’ collection online, at intervals over the next few months. The intention, apart from some mild amusement to those who recognise what the images are not, is to explore some themes of suburban life in this delightful Nottingham district and to consider how they relate to other specimens of suburbia.

Halfway through the show

My small exhibition of paintings at Bingham public library, Nottinghamshire, is roughly half way through, and the display will be taken down on Saturday, 28th February. Apparently there has been a steady stream of viewers, and some appreciative comments made, but so far no sales – nobody has any money at this time of year!

A couple of weeks ago a gentleman came into the library saying he had heard there was a painting of “The Test Match”. Indeed, there is. This is a greyscale version of it:

© R. Abbott 2015

It’s an art deco pub in Gordon Road, West Bridgford, the principal southern suburb of Nottingham, and it is to be recommended, not least for its ambience. My painting is a somewhat idealised, early morning representation of what, on the average weekday, is a busy and somewhat cluttered corner. Sadly, it seems, the enquirer was hoping for a painting of a cricket match, such as takes place at Trent Bridge, half a mile or so from the pub - which is of course named after the most famous event of the cricket season. I hope he didn’t go away too disappointed. Never mind. I shall be saying more about West Bridgford in subsequent posts, and connecting it further with my interests in art and in the suburban environment.

Meanwhile, go along to Bingham library and view the exhibition while it lasts. Details of location and opening hours are given on my previous post.

Exhibition of Paintings at Bingham Library

From now until the end of February I have an exhibition of recent paintings at Bingham Library. Opening hours are: Mondays 9 – 1 ; Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays 9 -7 ; Wednesdays 9 -12 ; Saturdays 9 – 4 ; Sundays closed.

Bingham Library is situated in Eaton Place, off the Market Place, and there is free car parking nearby (access via Newgate Street).

The works on display are unframed oil paintings. They are mostly townscapes, with locations in West Bridgford, Nottingham, and London. Details are as follows:

Autumnal North London    £80

Inspired by a visit to York Way in Islington

 

Browne’s and Bellamy’s    £100

The location is Cyril Road in West Bridgford. The title refers to former nearby residents

 

By the Park    £80

Imaginary West Bridgford. A hybrid of Holme and Albert Roads

 

Hickling    £80

The Grantham Canal basin

 

Hopperesque at Hoylake    £80

The breezy north west corner of the Wirral

 

Midland, bound for Cricklewood    £100

The title is from Sir John Betjeman’s “Parliament Hill Fields” (1945). An imaginary version of Lismore Circus, an area now demolished and rebuilt

 

Notting Hill night    £100

Ledbury Road, as it might have been before gentrification

 

Place de Dublin    £150

This strange road junction in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, the “Europe” quarter behind the Gare St Lazare, was also the subject of a famous 1877 painting by Gustave Caillebotte

 

Road near the Park    £100

Based on Edward Road in West Bridgford

 

Ryde Pier    £80

The pedestrian pier at Ryde, Isle of Wight

 

Summer Shadows    £150

Holland Park Avenue in west London

 

The Old School    £100

The path in front of Musters Road Infants’ School in West Bridgford. A Christmas Party is about to end, and a steam train on the adjacent Midland Railway has just passed. Otherwise, “Nothing has changed it’s still the same”.

 

The Test Match    £150

An optimistic view of a much loved pub in Gordon Road, West Bridgford

 

Weekday Cross Junction    £150

A Nottingham location, where the Great Central Railway entered the tunnel leading northwards into the Victoria Station. A spot now almost unidentifiable beneath concrete and trams

Happy New Year from the Robagraph

The Robagraph is back again for 2015. During the year I hope to be covering some of my creative pursuits, and making the occasional comment about transport proposals and anything else that brings out the inner rant in me.

Learning from Dawlish

The UK Environment Agency has been taking a lot of stick in the last few days, and apparently deservedly so, given its evident role in the causation of the disastrous floods in Somerset. The only dealings I have had with this body, over a trivial matter a few years ago, revealed an astonishing level of incompetence and bureaucratic absurdity (and that was in dealing with just one person – so think what an entire organisation can achieve !). I had written to point out that an information board provided by the Environment Agency not far from where I live contained several gross factual errors. The initial response I received thanked me for my Freedom of Information request, and supplied details of how to proceed. So I wrote again, trying to explain my purpose – which was to help the Agency improve its educative service to the public, by providing correct information. The reply came back that the board was nothing to do with them, so I then supplied photographs which showed the words “Environment Agency” plastered all over it. The next reply was that the matter would be forwarded to the appropriate person, but was immediately followed up by a letter from the same person, telling me that the board was not their responsibility – and seemingly unaware of our previous correspondence. At this point, deciding that sarcasm, anger or even humour would be lost on this witless minion, I gave up. I would like to think that today she’s up to her eyes in it in Somerset, but I’m very confident that she’s somewhere far more comfortable.

If you’re going to provide information as a public service, it’s important to get it right. If you can’t believe the Environment Agency when they’re dealing with establishable, uncontroversial, and fairly trivial facts, why should you believe their stories about climate change, or follow their advice when you have reason to believe you are  threatened with flooding? Oh no, you mustn’t object; they’re the experts you see, they understand these matters. The Environment must at all costs be protected, even if submerged by water or forested with wind turbines. No, not the countryside; The Environment. Sorry, you’re not getting it, are you. Not the land, not that place where some people live and work and find beauty, as they have done for many generations, no, not that, that isn’t important, but The Environment. That’s what matters. Being green, being sustainable, being carbon-footprint-guilt-free, protecting the rights of newts, rodents, and unusually brass-necked tits.

But enough of Lord Whatsisname. One of the most memorable images from this disastrous week in the West Country has been of the wrecked main line railway at Dawlish. This has resulted in the loss of rail services from Plymouth and Cornwall to and from the rest of the country, a situation which is likely to pertain for some time. Inevitably suggestions have arisen concerning the resurrection of lines long closed – in particular the direct inland cut-off between Exeter and Newton Abbot – while other comments have questioned the relevance of current discussions about HS2 when parts of the existing network are so in need of attention. I hope these suggestions and arguments will bear fruit, inevitably after the present crisis has subsided.

One thing we appear not to have is a national railway strategy (or indeed any kind of national strategy as far as I can see, other than for self-destruction), although doubtless there are think tanks, working parties (another fancy cake, dear ?), focus groups and quangos all expensively beavering (or, indeed, quangoing) away at such things, well insulated from reality and from each other, as well as local groups and rail professionals who know their history and are cognisant of the issues. I’ve recently been reading books on railway art and architecture, and on closed branch lines and stations, and the thing that struck me was that – even until well into the 1960s – there was so much stuff – so many tracks, alternative routes, stations, locos, carriages, personnel. There was a sense of safety in numbers; if something went wrong, there was always something you could do about it, someone nearby who would help, something else available  – well short of having to call in what’s left of the military or disturbing some fatuous slob in Westminster. Go to some other countries today – Belgium is a good example – and you’ll see how it used to be here, plenty of spare stuff, extra tracks, other routes, alternatives. Call them old fashioned? I wouldn’t. Here, however, ruthless efficiency (oh yes ?) has been achieved so completely that when disaster strikes there is no alternative, no resilience, no built-in redundancy to call upon.

Cornwall may have been cut off by exceptional weather conditions, but if you look at a railway map of Britain you will see that there are only two routes across the Anglo-Scottish border (so, then, only two sets of customs posts, minefields and guard dogs needed after 18th September), and only two major routes between England and Wales. Post-Beeching the network is so skeletal that major incidents – floods, other types of weather damage, accidents, terrorism – can have a paralysing effect across large areas. There are many pinch points in the network that are highly vulnerable to these sort of events; a glance at a map will readily identify them.

One of the precursors of the internet, the US Darpanet, was built with the idea that if any part of it got knocked out, e.g. by a nuclear strike, information could easily be re-routed. When planning HS2, or other improvements to the network, it will be as well to bear this kind of strategic thinking in mind. Sadly, it takes a meteorological  calamity to make the point.

Why Cinders did not go to the Hôtel

There’s a certain character who is ubiquitous on the telly these days. Allegedly he’s suffered personal misfortune in recent times, so I won’t name him or be too hard on him. The Beeb is evidently trying to find something for him to do, something that he can do. Some time ago he did a history of the railways of Great Britain that included a lot of film of  himself doing various things, like pretending to be a navvy and being in Canada, while managing to omit both Brunel and Beeching; more recently he’s appeared on quiz shows looking like a spare part, and the last time I had to switch him off was when he announced that Hitler came to power in 1934. I get heartily sick of being warned about news items containing flash photography; this particular individual should come with a “faulty fact” warning.

At the beginning of the year this hapless soul was scheduled for some other worthy venture at exactly the same transmission time as the new mini-series of “Sherlock”. What a shame. This mischance does, however, provide a link to a discussion of other factual errors. “Sherlock”, starring The Cumberbatch, with Martin Freeman as Dr Watson, is hugely enjoyable television, albeit baffling at times, and the episode featuring Holmes’s best man speech at Watson’s wedding was simply wonderful. The initial use of “postmodernist” cut-and-paste techniques, head-up displays, tag clouds, vast data bases and other I.T. references was inspired and compelling, and not incompatible with the original Holmes. Sadly, by the time of the last episode in the most recent season, the fast moving exhilarating irreverence had degenerated into a load of self-referential, nod-and-wink, smirking metafictional tosh. Amusing, but tosh all the same.

The first episode in the recent series featured a “lost” Underground station between Westminster and St James’s Park stations on the District and Circle lines. “Lost” tube stations are a well researched niche fascination, much is known about them (York Road, City Road, Down Street and South Kentish Town among many others) and one would not have to be particularly fanatical to know that such a station – supposedly directly beneath the Houses of Parliament - does not exist. Never mind, it might do, for that is in the nature of this slightly paranoid transport specialisation. Fair enough.  Holmes and Watson were indeed shown on location in the splendid concourse of Westminster station. As one would expect, other locations, perhaps the disused Aldwych station, were used for filming. Fine. What was unacceptable, and something that millions of people would have spotted, was that on the supposed CCTV images, a deep level tube station was shown – I don’t know which one it was, but it was definitely not a District Line station. Presumably it would have been possible to film in the correct location. Viewers of “Sherlock” are not likely to be stupid; one felt insulted. Apparently there is an entire website devoted to the glaring errors in this episode.

OK, that was fiction, and the annoyingly evident inaccuracy perhaps doesn’t matter very much. Errors in supposedly scholarly works are less excusable. I’ve recently been reading a biography of Napoleon, which refers to the exhumation of the well-preserved body in St Helena, then the transfer of ashes to and through Paris, and finally the re-burial of the body under the great dome of the Hôtel des Invalides. In passing the author, a proper historian, not the hapless TV presenter, refers to the Invalides dome as one of the world’s great domed spaces, like Westminster Abbey. Oh, not St Paul’s Cathedral then? I wonder what line he was on (I suspect him of being an American).

Confused, I read and re-read the section. Was the mighty emperor buried or cremated or what? The impression I formed was that the author didn’t actually know, was copying from some other confused source, and wasn’t taking any chances. I mean, it’s kind of important, and it would be embarrassing to get it wrong. I looked at the English language version of the official Hôtel des Invalides website, which – astonishingly – said much the same thing: body, ashes, body. Recourse to Wikipedia and several other sources established that it was a body throughout, but that the French expression “La retour des cendres” refers specifically to this postmortem Napoleonic homecoming, and that “cendres” refers not to cremated ashes or cinders, but to mortal remains. “The Return of the Ashes” is something quite a few people would like to see ! It would have helped if the biographer had bothered to unpick the details for us.

Some people like to slag off Wikipedia for supposed inaccuracies; used sensibly, I think it’s wonderful, and I’d like it to get even more wonderful, more detailed, more comprehensive in its coverage. Though, you would kind of expect errors in a resource like that. What is more worrying, though, is when supposed authorities – the makers of would-be convincing fictions, historians and biographers – are seemingly happy to allow errors and very doubtful assertions through in this way.