A long while back I blogged about Adlestrop:
Trains coming down the Evenlode Valley on the Cotswold Line no longer stop at Adlestrop. The station was closed in the mid-’60s. Even the memorial to Thomas’s poem, and the GWR seat to which it was fixed, now resides —or did at Malcolm’s last count—in a bus shelter. Before the railway, Jane Austen came visiting her mother’s cousin, the Rev. Thomas Leigh, at Adlestop House, then the local vicarage. Some suggest that Adlestrop is an original for Mansfield Park.
Many years ago, on a Western Region steam train, adolescent Malcolm also stopped at Adlestrop.
It was a bright, warm, English early-summer’s day. In homage, Malcolm lowered the window on one its leather strap to look out. The engine leaked steam. There was a bird, Malcolm hopes, at this distance in time, a blackbird, singing.
I see I even found an image of the bus shelter:
Since 2017, it’s a ‘listed building’, entry number 1443893.
Pennan, in what we antiques call Banffshire but is now absorbed into Aberdeenshire, not only keeps its iconic red telephone box (as featured in Local Hero) but has one of the few working telephones left. It works because that’s what the tourists and trippers want. In reality, it’s not the one in the movie (that’s a prop, because the original was and is out-of-sight and less photogenic).
Sooner or later, by intrinsic value or by acquired connotations, all of Britain — nay, all of Europe — could be ‘listed’ and the country finally descend into Disneyfication and the gloom and decay of ‘heritage’. Only last evening I caught the BBC’s Clive Myrie celebrating Matera, with the inevitable link to Bond and No Time to Die.
Out of this I draw connections:
I’ll take those in order.
Myth and reality
On a daily basis I see the iconic west end of York Minster. The two towers don’t match the central one: that’s because they are a later addition. Moreover, the Minster as a unit has been subject to repetitive rebuildings: the central tower was rebuilt in 1732-3 (there was formerly a wooden spire); the north-west tower blew down in 1751, which involved reconstructing the roof of the west end; major fires in 1154, 1829, 1840 and 1984. In other words, a construction in process and progress, continuing to the present day and an indefinite future. Lately, we have ‘Queen Elizabeth II Square’ (complete with promised statue) as a replacement for part of ‘Precentors’ Court’ — but also to ‘harden’ the area from possible terrorism.
By the way, Precentor’s Court largely factored in our removal to York. We had already sold our London house, and the calendar was clicking. I saw this 1720s premises advertised, and we came to view. It was a bit ricketty, and I was struck (literally) by the unused basement. I remarked to the estate-agent that it might convert to a kitchen and dining area. All it would need was dropping the floor a foot or so. Her horror was immediately evident: ‘You haven’t heard of the York Archaeological Trust, have you?’ Any such work in the historic centre of York requires detailed planning permissions, which would easily take a couple of years. Later I discovered the site was above the monks’ burial ground; so perhaps just as well.
Meanwhile I can never get used to the scrubbed up modern London: why is ‘Big Ben’ (OK, strictly now ‘the Elizabeth Tower’) not its proper Victorian-sooty self?
Legends
The GWR seat and station sign for ‘Adlestrop’ may be another icon, but the location went through serial renamings. It opened in 1853 as ‘Addlestrop and Stow Road’, was shortened to ‘Addlestrop’ a couple of decades on, and became ‘Adlestrop’ only in 1883. After the Beeching cuts, in the mid-1960s, it was no more.
With those changes of name, it came close to being another invented place on the network. I think of ‘Wells-on-Sea’, as was, between the railway opening in 1857, and the Urban District Council getting a grip in the 1950s. Come to think of it, I’d need to check what my birth certificate calls the place, and whether it is properly hyphated.
Similarly, there’s ‘Eaglescliffe‘ which was ‘Eaglescliffe Junction’ with the arrival of the railway, though the spelling seems to come from the seventeenth century. It cannot alter the fact that the rest of the parish is ‘Egglescliffe’.
None of that can match the myths of King’s Cross: Boudica was supposed to be buried under platform 10. That one seems to originate with John Bagford in 1715, to explain the discovery of an elephant tusk (clearly, one from Claudius’ invasion) buried with a flint axe on the Gray’s Inn Road. Oh, it was so much easier when an ‘antiquary’ could get away with such a fantasy. Oh, wait on: JK Rowling went one better, transplanting ‘Platform 9¾’ from Euston to King’s Cross, and forever confusing the passing visitor. My great regret is the statue of Sir Nigel Gresley (certainly an improvement on the tacky thing at St Pancras, and the much-loved and hand-polished Paddington Bear), thanks to the gripes of his family lacking the mallard duck.
Preservation
No city stands still. Unless it is preserved (like Florence and elsewhere) in architectural aspic.
I recall an ‘expert’ reckoning the state of the economy could be gauged by counting the cranes around the horizon. Similarly, the progress of ‘bourgeoisification’ can be measured by the number of dumpsters/skips in the street.
So we arrive at a very personal gripe. My two neighbouring cottages have been ‘rescued’ and ‘upgraded’ since we moved in. That means four years of hammerings and aggravations, one of which is still continuing.
Now we also have major ‘renovations’ happening in the premises to our rear.
Help!
Wait a moment, there’s also this:
Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service 