Butterfly World

I promised Rose a visit to somewhere with a butterfly house this summer, so yesterday I took her to Butterfly World (via a stop off at Tevye's office in nearby St Albans so she could see where he works).

There were butterflies - which proved sadly disappointing from Rose's point of view as she really, really wanted one to land on her and none of them obliged, unreasonably ignoring her grumbles and complaints at their lack of cooperation. Quite why she thought that whinging would make them more likely to mistake her for a flower I have no idea!

There were also leaf cutter ants, stick insects and various other six legged beasties.


A nice play area let Rose work out her frustrations. Her yellow t-shirt was carefully chosen for its supposed butterfly attracting properties!


And we both enjoyed exploring a series of small quirky gardens. These giant garden tools and flower pots were impressive.



Rose loved this giant willow nest with wooden eggs


And I liked this quirky thyme garden


So, disappointing butterfly behaviour notwithstanding, we had a good afternoon. An Eden Project style biome is planned for next year, which should be well worth seeing.

Whitechapel

Tevye is a true Cockney - born in Whitechapel, within the sound of Bow bells. Before meeting friends for lunch last weekend we had time to take a walk around the area where he lived as a child. Very different now in some ways, most obviously in that the Jewish community that dominated Whitechapel has since moved out to the suburbs and replaced by more recent immigrants, mainly Bangladeshi. In other ways not so different - much of the area is still poor and run-down, sandwiched between the brash, glitzy City (the City is the financial centre of London, think Wall Street) and the up-market renovated areas of Docklands.

We started with Petticoat Lane market, but the road layout at the Whitechapel end had changed so much that Tevye no longer recognised it. The market gets its name from the garments once made there. The Victorians changed the road name to Middlesex Street to avoid public mention of undergarments but the original name stuck to the market.

Next we walked down Whitechapel Road.

The main claim to fame of the area is that it was the stalking ground of the infamous Jack the Ripper, a mass murderer of the 1890s who was never caught and has been the subject of interest and speculation ever since. Posters and memorabilia in this shop window advertised "Jack the Ripper" walking tours.

Running between Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road is the street where Tevye lived. The buildings are divided into units of six flats (apartments), in three storey pairs of two flanking a single entrance. In his day they were owned by the nearby London Hospital and were very basic, without bathrooms and with a single toilet shared between each pair of flats. Since then they have been renovated and bathrooms installed. This end of the road is now social housing run by a housing association. Someone living in Tevye's old block was none too tidy, with bags of rubbish scattered around the entrance. Bizarrely the other end of the street is Georgan terraced houses which sell for a fortune (I googled and found one for sale for £795,000!).

Tevye's flat was on the middle floor. The "No Ball Games" sign was written in English and (I presume) Bengali. In Tevye's day that rule either was not there or was routinely ignored, as he remembers spending a lot of time hitting a tennis ball against the wall!

Heading down to St Katherine's Dock for lunch we passed Tevye's old primary school, a fairly grim Victorian building brightened by a centenary mosaic at the entrance.

More photos from our day out to come later.

Photos from the South

I did a nice photo blog from our day in Chichester last week, which caused my phone to blow a 3G (mobile data) gasket when I tried to upload it. Should have waited until I was home with wi-fi. Now my Blogpress app refuses to show me any saved entries, so the post has disappeared without trace. Reproducing it would be too demoralising, so I am just going to post a batch of random pictures from our trip away.

Cherub enjoying the autumn leaves

Chichester Guildhall - originally a priory church, which became the town hall (Guildhall) after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. Now a museum.

The world's largest liturgical book in Chichester cathedral. Nobody knows exactly where it came from or when it was made - 17th century Mexico / Latin America seems to be the most likely origin. The size was so that the book could be seen simultaneously by a number of people.

The ceiling of Chichester cathedral. I have a thing for Gothic ceilings.

The Isle of Wight has a small railway line that runs from the ferry landing at Ryde Pier Head to Shanklin in the south-east. The trains are cast offs from the London Underground.

Shanklin Old Village. Very pretty, even on a grey autumn day.

Shanklin beach - grey sea and grey sky!

Another Gothic roof, this time at Winchester Cathedral. Beautiful fan vaulting.

A medieval wooden carving on the end of one of the choir stalls at Winchester.

Canal Festival

A few pictures from the the local canal festival Tevye, Cherub and I went to on Saturday.

Morris dancers

Clog dancers

And a rather impressive drummer

Rural crafts

And narrow boats

I took a couple of short videos of the folk dance group, English Miscellany - the camera on my phone was doing battle with the sun, so the lighting isn't great. This first clip of the morris dancing was cut short by Star phoning me to say she had a stomach ache and felt sick. Fortunately that was as bad as it got!

This second clip was of the finale, with both men and women dancers.

From the Train Window

And therefore a bit blurry due to movement and marks on the window. Also taken on my phone trying not avoid pointing towards the sun.

My station. Two tiny platforms, one on either side of a road.

A house at the end of a platform. Anyone want to buy it? Only two trains an hour, none at night or on Sundays.

One of several level crossings (British for a train track crossing a road)

Green countryside

Flat Bedfordshire wheat fields

A disused brickworks (this is only a small part of it)

A major road, about to link into the M1 motorway (the main north-south arterial road). Lots of lorries!

And part of a gigantic distribution centre - the headquarters of Amazon UK. I couldn't get a picture of the Amazon.co.uk sign as it was partially hidden behind trees.

Aysgarth, Yorkshire

I have a load of photos stacked up from various trips over the last month that I have been meaning to post. This batch made it as far as a draft last week, but never got any further. Ah well! I'll try to catch up this month.

On the way back from Cumbria at the end of March, we stopped off for lunch at Aysgarth in Yorkshire because we spotted a water fall marked on the map. The water fall turned out to be a series, and we only made it as far as the gentle upper fall.

This is St. Andrews Church, on a hill overlooking the falls:

One of the things I love about exploring old churches is that they often contain unexpected hidden gems, and this one had a spectacular one. Inside we discovered the stunning Jervaulx Screen. This is the rood screen from the medieval Cistercian abbey of Jervaulx, which probably dates from the fifteenth century. Jervaulx Abbey held the advowson (the right to appoint a priest) of Aysgarth Church, and the screen was moved here to protect it when Jervaulx was dissolved by King Henry VIII.

A close up of the fan vaulting at the top of the screen:

And of marquetry on the end of one of the built-in seats:

Looking down from the top of the falls:

This waterfall is all of about two feet high - not exactly Niagara! A very pretty setting though.

Looking up the falls from the road:

World Heritage Sites

One of my Day Zero Project ideas was to visit seven World Heritage sites that I hadn't been to before. I was checking the official list out for possibilities yesterday, and decided to list all the sites I have already visited (this one is mostly an aide memoire for myself, so please feel free to skip!). So far I have managed 37 out of the 911 on the list:

• Historic centre of Brugge (Bruges), Belgium
• Mont-Saint-Michel, France
• Palace and Park of Versailles, France
• Rheims Cathedral, France
• Historic Fortified City of Carcassonne, France
• Acropolis, Athens, Greece
• Old Town of Corfu, Greece
• Historic Centre of Rome, Properties of the Holy See
• Vatican City
• Buda Castle Quarter, Budapest
• Andrassy Avenue, Budapest
• Masada, Israel
• Historic Centre of Florence, Italy
• Piazza del Duomo, Pisa, Italy
• Venice, Italy
• Historic Centre of San Gimignano, Italy
• Historic Centre of Siena, Italy
• Assisi, Italy
• Old City of Jerusalem
• City of Valletta, Malta
• Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, Malta
• Megalithic Temples of Malta
• 17th Century Canal Ring Area of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd, Wales
• Durham Castle and Cathedral, England
• Stonehenge, England
• Studley Royal Park and Fountains Abbey, England
• Blenheim Palace, England
• City of Bath, England
• Hadrian's Wall, England
• Westminster Palace and Westminster Abbey, England
• Canterbury Cathedral, England
• Tower of London, England
• Maritime Greenwich, England
• Dorset and East Devon Coast, England
• Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City, England
• Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape, England

Hadrian's Wall

On our trip up north last weekend we made it as far as Hadrian's Wall.

By the time I got to the top, I needed to sit down. The Romans built on hills to make it harder for the Scots. And for future tourists.

This road from Birdoswald runs beside the wall. As you can see, when the Romans wanted to build a wall from A to B, they went in a very straight line. From west to east:

And east to west:

A little further along this stretch we picked up two hikers who were trying to cram the Hadrian's Wall  east to west coast walk into four days. By the time they reached this point they were hitching as one of them had hurt her ankle. We spotted her limping and were able to save them seven miles by dropping them at the campsite they were aiming for.

I had never visited Hadrian's Wall before, which means I get to check off another World Heritage site for my Day Zero Project list (I'm aiming to visit seven, and along with the two in Budapest that gives me three so far).

London Aquarium

A few pictures from our trip to the London Aquarium on Monday. Cherub and Little Friend N had a great time, especially so because they had each other to share the fun with:

I didn't take the camera, so experimented with taking pictures on my new-to-me phone. It doesn't handle movement at all because of the long shutter delay, but works well enough as a back up for those days when I either forget my camera or don't want to have to carry it.

 

The highlight for the littles were the rays, particularly the large ones that swam over us in the walk through tunnel - couldn't get a picture of them, or the big turtles, as they were on the move. 

 

This fish was ugly in a beautiful sort of way ... or beautiful in an ugly way? 

I liked the effect of this starfish climbing up the glass.

 

The lighting effects in the jelly fish tank had them changing colour. I managed to get a nice picture of them in the pink phase.