Venice With Wet Feet...

Monday 24 September 2018. We sail into Venice. We leave the ship directly into a covered walkway leading into the Italian dockside customs. Then we buy tickets for the local water bus to St Mark's Square. "Will it be flooded?" someone asks. "Well, we have been here five times before and we've never seen it flooded," I say, truthfully but perhaps a little prematurely...

The unmistakeable and familiar sight of the Doges Palace and St Mark's Basilica. The cafes are fairly exclusive here...

The major buildings of the square are covered in posts from earlier visits. I always like a stroll round the arcades. If Miss Franny makes appreciative noises at any shop window it's best to put on a bit of a forced stroll if you know what I mean...

There are a couple of these tiny cafe rooms. The tables all bear a reserved sign.

These are what many come to Venice to see. There are around four hundred gondolas in Venice as opposed to centuries gone by when there were thousands. Before the 20th century many had covered cabins for passengers with windows having shutters with louvred slats - hence Venetian blinds...

You should do this in any large city but especially in Venice. Look up! You will be rewarded many times by many beautiful carvings, statues and architectural features. I was spellbound right up to the moment when we reached the steps up to a bridge over a canal and I tripped up. Ah yes... look up occasionally!

Each time we are in Venice we try to find some place we haven't been before. Usually by finding new routes between major sights but having now been six times, we may have to venture away from these in future! This time we found a free music museum and went inside to look at violins, contrabasses and mandolins from 500 years ago.

We ventured down a couple of dead ends leading to private gates and necessitating U-turns, but inevitably we found ourselves eventually at the Grand Canal.

We have our favourite cafe at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, which does our beloved latte machiatto and always has a tempting selection of hand-made sandwiches. Moreover they profess to understand my attempts to speak Italian and so have earned my undying love at least until some future point when they might say "what was that???"

Ooh! This caught my eye! A guitar made of Murano glass! It has real strings - but were the pickups real pickups or more glass? And I must admit my first thought was not "How much does it cost?" (enough not to display the price ticket) but "How much would it weigh?" I'm not sure I could wear that around my neck for hours on end!

The Rialto Bridge is, with St Mark's Square and the Bridge of Sighs, one of Venice's major attractions. It is the latest of a number of bridges on this site, and dates from 1591. Oh... well done, that young lady on the right... Nice gum bubble!

Looking up! Just at this point there are far too many people pressed against you for you actually to fall over anyway. Keep focussed on the pressure of your pockets and grip on your valuables!

We return to St Marks... Square... Oh... there's water, there's crowds milling about unwilling to paddle. There's crowds paddling. There are police officers herding people onto a far too narrow walkway expecting single-file traffic in each direction. With the unrelenting pressure of people being forced onto each end, idiots in the middle are trying to stop to take photos. I just pointed the camera without even looking at it and clicked as I walked.

"Uno oro!" said a news vendor, throwing his arms up in exasperation at my question that he must have heard a million times. So, one hour at high tide. Nothing to see here, keep moving...

We caught a water bus back well before the crowds would leave us panicking that the next boat would be the last that the ship would wait for. Then a relaxing hour before we gathered on the Promenade Deck on Deck 6 to watch the sail away.

I actually took this from the windows of the dining room as we were eating dinner.

Songs tonight included Creedence Clearwater's classic Bad Moon Rising and Herman's Hermits' sing-a-long favourite I'm Into Something Good.

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1977 Blackpool Photo Album 6 - Pleasure Beach Area

My photo album of Blackpool photos still has a few pages left to show. Today we are down South Shore, towards the Pleasure Beach.

It's a very different skyline to today's, where the blue and red steelwork of The Big One dominates the view. The column of the Space Tower is the tallest structure on this 1977 photo and instead of a row of shops stretching along Ocean Boulevard, there is open space and the pillars of the Monorail holding up the track.

In the distance is the Pleasure Beach loop of the tram network, a good spot for taking photos of trams as there was almost always two or three trams standing there or moving slowly around the tight curves. Only a minority of trams went down all the way to Squires Gate and those terminating at the Pleasure Beach would go round this loop to swap back to the northward track.

On the extreme right is the bridge over to the Open Air Baths. A sign warns vehicles on the car park underneath: "Low Bridge Height 8ft 10" (2.7m). After a bad storm and high seas that could mean the depth of the water that laps at the bridge. It wasn't the safest place to leave your car in winter as the following shot from February 1983 shows!

We'll nip down to the tram loop and see what's there...

This is a bit of a teaser! Not so much because of the photo of the 1934 "Boat" tram, but for the bit of the multi-coloured Brush tram seen at the left of the photo. This was a specially painted tram celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee year. Something stopped me taking its photo on this occasion, though I can't recall what it was. Maybe my wife was getting impatient, maybe the baby started to cry (she now has a three-year-old of her own!) or maybe the tram simply moved off before I could get a decent shot. So let me dig...

This is the best photo I have got of it and it's partly obscured by a sign. This is a crop, a small portion of a photo taken from the Central Pier on another occasion, this time on colour slide film. The tram had actually been painted in this colour scheme the year before. 1976 marked the centenary of Blackpool as a borough and during that year this tram had commemorated that event.

Still, at least they added the new lettering and the "Long Live The Queen" bit! Funny in a way to think that almost 40 years ago we were celebrating how long the Queen had been on the throne! Since then we have been through the Golden and Diamond Jubilees and seen a whole lot of change.

The album also holds this photo of a 1930s "Balloon" tram. These double decker trams were brought in as replacements for the formidable Dreadnought trams - we saw a preserved example of these in the first instalment of this series.

By 1977 trams were carrying advertisements along the side and a few trams were painted with all-over adverts. In later years these paint jobs covered the windows as well to the annoyance of passengers and the detriment of goodwill, though Blackpool Transport, i.e. the Corporation, raking in the money from the advertising, refused to acknowledge this. The paint went on a mesh over the windows. It was still possible to see through the holes and even if it was darker inside and appeared darker outside, not to mention the strain on passengers' eyes, that was thought good enough by the powers that be - who presumably never travelled on them and tried to look out of the windows...

This however carries a simple banner advertisement for Empire Pools. The National Lottery, which started in 1994, had a large impact on the popularity of football pools, whose heyday was probably during the 1950s and 60s. They were collected house to house by teams of collectors who braved elements and dark nights with bags of money around their shoulders with very little risk of being mugged. I collected coupons for both of the larger firms: Littlewoods and Vernons during the late 60s and early 70s without any incidents. I don't think I'd like to risk it now...

There were several ways to gamble on a football coupon with the most popular being the "any eight from ten" or "any eight from twelve" lines. Against a list of football fixtures (all held on a Saturday afternoon in those days before Sky arguably ruined the sport) you marked an "x" against those matches you thought would be a score draw. The scoring system awarded one point to a match where one of the two teams won, 2 points for a 0-0 draw and 3 points for a score draw. The object was to achieve 24 points from your top 8 scoring attempts which was the Jackpot score with the prize fund shared amongst all punters (if any) achieving it. Football pools were the general public's best chance at winning life-changing amounts of money without going into a bookmakers. In the early to mid 1970s after a few well publicised scandals where collectors had just pocketed money and thrown coupons away in the hope that punters wouldn't win anyway, public confidence in the collectors dwindled and most customers by 1977 either sent coupons off by mail, filling out coupons for several weeks at a time, or picked them up from and returned them with stake money to newsagents shops.

Empire offered a plan of "any eight from 20" with each attempt ("line") costing just one penny. Twenty such lines would cost you 20p per week with a chance of winning tens of thousands of pounds. The odds were far better than those of winning the National Lottery!

The 1937 casino building at the Pleasure Beach has never been a gambling casino. Designed by the Pleasure Beach's architect Joseph Emberton in the 1930s (replacing an equally-loved "casino" building of 1913) it housed restaurants and a banqueting suite and an Art Deco private flat that still exists. Although much altered internally it remains a Grade II listed building and is often described as the north's answer to the De La Warr Pavilion (at Bexhill-on-Sea). The Pleasure Beach monorail used to go round the outside of this building.

This is quite a personal memory jogger for me. This first-floor restaurant is situated between the Lucky Star amusements arcade and the pub on the corner of Station Road opposite the South Pier. In 1977 we lived with my parents in a hotel and guest house. My wife worked in the hotel and at nights after work, I would help out in the bar (hic!) On Sundays the main meal was served at lunchtime rather than evening and that was our free time - Sunday afternoons. Blackpool would be awash with guest house landladies, some of whom would even take off their headscarves and take out their curlers and go out eagerly to share the antics or scandals of the week with their friends and colleagues from other establishments over a brown ale or two.

This was our Sunday evening eating place. In 1977 you could still find pretty young waitresses in starched white pinnies over a black skirt and top. We would order steak cooked well done, believing wrongly that cremation made it more tender... Sometimes we'd get a little giddy and have a bottle of Blue Nun to go with it. Or (where's that bucket...) a bottle of Beaujolais (often called "Bow-jollies" by those trying desperately to impress!) By heck, these were sophisticated days...

Here's a turn up for the books! The photo album features this one photograph of Cleveleys whilst every other photo is of Blackpool! Here we see a Progress Twin-Car, tram and trailer, crossing the junction of Victoria Street West and East in the centre of Cleveleys. There's a lot more traffic lights and paint on the road these days but essentially the scene hasn't changed all that much. The thing that perhaps dates this photo the most is that delicious black and white striping on the traffic light poles. Never really needed much in Blackpool and Cleveleys, but as a young boy in Rochdale on the edge of the Pennines, in winter these stripes told you how deep the snow was... Global warming? When I was a nipper no one - and I mean no one - would dream of driving in winter without a spade and a few empty coal sacks in the car boot in case they got stuck in the snow. No, the coal sacks weren't to put snow in... you put them under the wheels to give a bit of traction to get out of a hole!

Return to Blackpool Promenade and Beach Index Page

Noah? Give Us a Lift?

I got caught up in the flooding this week, though not to any great state of discomfort. It did mean I had to spend an extra night away though and poor Fran was left on her own from Monday to Friday.

The week started off ok, with a trip up to Glasgow, which was gloriously sunny on Monday night. The travel agents had put me the far side of town for some reason - the hotel was probably a couple of quid cheaper than the one by the venue which was in the next street to the station I arrived at, but I then paid six pounds odd in taxi fares getting to and from with my bags... This sort of thing happens when the public sector is under close scrutiny to be cost effective - it becomes less so.

Tuesday night saw me on my way to Newcastle where I had another event on Wednesday and then on Thursday I went into the office for my annual appraisal and to wish Doug Belshaw well, as he left to go off doing exciting things with Mozilla (I'm using their Firefox browser right now, Doug!)

So even though I'd been away three nights I stayed for a later train and went out for lunch with the gang, catching the 2:20pm train for Carlisle to pick up the West Coast main line.

All went well for an hour or so. We went through a horrendous rainstorm and I saw a couple of flashes of lightning. Then we reached Haltwhistle. And stayed there.

After a while the conductor came and announced there were floods ahead and we couldn't go on. Also there were floods behind and we couldn't go back. Also the roads were flooded and the bus companies were refusing to come to the rescue...

So as we were at a station, we got off singly, then in groups to gawp up the track. There in the distance was a silver sheen of water and it was coming towards us.

Another 20 minutes or half an hour passed and I looked up from my book and saw a stream passing the train...

So we got out again and trotted to the front of the train.

The water had passed completely under the train and was still flowing under like a fairly fast stream.

Shortly after this we were told they would set off and try to get back to Newcastle. By this time it was gone 4:00pm and we had another hour at least to go before we would get back to where we started from.

We went slowly through the floods, crossed tracks and picked up people moaning at how late we were and a couple of real neanderthals of the type who make railway journeys that much more tedious.

Halfway there we heard that Newcastle station had been closed due to flooding...

Hurrah for Facebook - one of my colleagues had noticed my reports on there and despite the fact that it was gone 5:00pm I got a call asking if I needed a hotel sorting out. Unsure as to whether we would reach Newcastle I opted to stay at the Premier Inn near the Metro Centre and then when I got off there I realised there would be no buses and little chance of a taxi so phoned the hotel for directions to walk it.

The directions started by "Walk through the Metro Centre..." which was impossible as it had been evacuated so I skirted it and came to another precinct of shops who were all ripping carpets up and brushing waves of water out of their front doors. The roof of Ikea had come down. They had brought a new one out of stock but were struggling as some screws were missing or they had one strut too many or something...

Finally getting to the hotel they had a queue of would-be guests who were being turned away. Had I not been booked in by my wonderful team, I'd have been spending the night on a chair somewhere!

I finally got home at lunchtime on Friday after going back to Newcastle and going via York. Even so we got held up at Darlington because of animals on the line... Stranded fish perhaps...

Home felt good.

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T'was a Dark and Stormy Night...

...and the following morning I ventured out with the camera to take photos of the aftermath. This was early February 1983 and Blackpool had been treated to a combination of high winds and a high tide. Whilst lots of people think this is fun to walk up to the railings to see if they can dodge the waves, these photos show what power there really is in the sea...

The old Open Air Baths were still down at South Shore Promenade where the Sandcastle is now. The car park below Promenade level had filled with seawater overnight.

To give this some meaning, here's another view looking back to where I was standing to take the first shot. The entrance to the Baths was reached from a footbridge over the car park. There was 15 feet of clearance beneath the bridge...

A little further north, the ice cream, fancy hat and rock stalls that flanked the South Pier had not fared all that well. One lies on its front to the left of the photo and another has been knocked over by a combination of wind and sea and left stranded on the tram tracks.

Just next to where it used to be the sea has torn huge chunks out of the sea wall and Promenade and collapsed the iron railings.

Closer to the Central Pier and there is more damage. The cast iron bench has been tossed about from its place at the side of the Promenade shelter as though by a giant, the cast iron legs and feet in broken pieces over the pavement. For company the sea has left it a cast iron manhole cover, lifted from its place and swept here by the weight of water swirling about on the Promenade. The shelter's own seating and internal structure has been broken and swept into the sea.

Respect the sea. When it is rough and backed by high tides and wind the sea has no respect for you. At all...

Large versions of the photos: baths landscape, baths portrait, broken stalls, promenade damage, shelters

Ancient Wycoller Bridge

4 May 1998. We had gone for a run out to Wycoller on the border of Bronte Country close to the boundary between Lancashire and Yorkshire.

There are three old bridges to be seen at Wycoller, but two of them will have to remain for future entries.

Here I'm sitting on a huge single slab of stone that forms one of the bridges. The bridge is called Clam Bridge and is an ancient monument. It was set here over a thousand years ago - some descriptions list it as an Iron Age bridge. That would multiply its age somewhat, but whatever the truth of it is; it's an old bridge!

We were lucky to see it in this condition. The following year and again in 1990 it was swept away and broken into two pieces by floods roaring down Wycoller Beck.

Restoration work was done in 1991 to repair the bridge and set it back in place.

You can see from this photo that it is heavily worn along its length. This is the effect of countless generations of feet, with those of the later centuries until the second half of the 20th century being encased in iron-shod clogs.

This bridge is the furthest from the village of Wycoller, so a walk up the path alongside the beck is called for. This is part of the Bronte Way.

On the way you will pass a large barn which has been laid out as an information centre and museum.

It contains this wierd piece of agricultural machinery - actually most pieces of agricultural machinery look wierd don't they? It's an early grass cutter probably more for meadows than your lawn. It has a seat for the operator and would have been pulled by a horse or possibly a wife...

Return to Curiosities: Bridges Index

Garstang Music And Arts Festival

Were we lucky or what?!? At 6:30am this morning the Heavens opened and as the radio news came on half an hour later it was all about floods and dire warnings.

We got to Garstang early and the sky was cloudy but it was dry. We set up and played an hour and a half then there were a few spots of rain. We switched off and covered over and took a lunch break whilst the rain stopped and blue sky inched its way over us.

By the time we started again at 2:00pm we had bright sunshine and a decent sized audience. We played our way through the 1950s and 1960s and then launched into Status Quo's Rocking All Over The World. It was like switching on an audience magnet. People started coming our way from every direction and we ended the afternoon with a few rock and roll numbers each one generating enthusiastic applause.

All day the fire brigade were just a couple of hundred yards down the road pumping away water from a flooded stretch of road!

The Radio Says...

It was early morning. About the time when conciousness struggles to overcome unconciousness even though the radio alarm has started a rather annoying yet persistant Scissor Sisters noise.

Thankfully the Scissors snipped and were replaced by the drone of the news. I had groped around enough to switch the lamp on but now as the music faded, darkness once more started to take over. I let it do its thing, gratefully.

I was then rudely erupted by Fran bursting out laughing.
"The radio says your school is closed!"

Perhaps I should have said "my sleep was interrupted" rather than "I was erupted" but to be honest that's what it felt like a bit anyway...

So I've been at work today from my own desk and computer, through the wonders of modern technology, as able to access files in Newcastle from Blackpool as I would be from an office in Bilsborrow.

Meanwhile homes all around me were having power cuts and water cuts. I could have had to swap my dedicated slog for standing in a queue with a bucket and I'm just as pleased not to have had to resort to that. Selfish I know.

The college is open again tomorrow. The tide's gone out.

Evacuated!

Ooh, a bit of excitement at the office today.

I live in Blackpool and work for the University of Northumbria so I rent a room at a local college and am a "remote" worker.

This morning we had our usual Monday morning telconference meeting and when I looked out of the window afterwards, this was the sight that greeted me.

The road had turned into a river and there was quite a spectacular waterfall over the sleeping policeman! I popped into the next office to find we were being evacuated as the water was coming from the river that had burst its banks and water was rising rapidly at the main entrance.

In fact there were only 2 minutes separating these photographs which show the same view.

We went out the fire exit and waded out to dry land. Then it was a case of find the shallowest route to the car and hope I could get home wihtout any problems! The A6 and the West Coast railway line were closed nearby but I was heading for Blackpool and managed with a few slowdowns for flooded areas, one being a bit longer than the others whilst a tractor dragged an eejit out of the middle. See, making all that spray wasn't a good idea then!

Addendum

The Ladies Over The Water are killing themselves laughing at the "sleeping policeman". It's what we Brits call speed humps... This one is missing, presumed lost at sea...

Floods and Aftermaths

No, in this case I'm not referring to the current weather, but rather to the subject of a few photos of Blackpool I've taken in past.

Yesterday I uploaded a couple of photographs of flooding to my Flickr account (no longer active). Almost immediately someone commented asking if I had any similar photographs. Whilst the answer is 'yes', as the photos were taken in the late 1970s or early 1980s, they are on film negative and the only scans I have are somewhat more modest in size. The negatives are up in the attic and I will definitely dig some out over the weekend, but for now I had a small scan of lumps of seaweed, left all over the Promenade roadway by a high tide in or around 1979.

The Promenade tends to be closed to traffic when weather like this is forecast with any certainty but every now and then a high wind (and there are plenty of those in Blackpool!) whips the tide up an extra ten feet or so and can wash over the Promenade. At the moment the sea defences are being made a little more effective in an attempt to reduce the probability of this happening. Although with the sort of rain we've been having over the past few days the flooding need not necessarily come from the sea...!

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Pennystone Rock and Drowned Villages

An email came in today from John Hitchon:

"Hi John.
As a sandgrown'n myself I have found your website very interesting, thinking about it there is a lot more to Blackpool than meets the eye, its history for instance.

I have lived here now for over 47 years and I too have seen many changes in the surrounding areas of the Fylde coast. When I was as school which was many moons ago, we had to choose a subject of interest to which I chose the history of Blackpool. The only thing was I would have loved to find out more about the history of Singleton Thorpe and that of Pennystone Rock, but as having made searches through numerous libraries I failed to find anything about it really.

So what I would like to ask you is if you can shine any light on the history of them ?"

There's not a great deal of hard fact known about Singleton Thorpe I think - here's what I've read in various books, web sites and so on. Some of it may be true, some of it may be a bit suspect but it makes a good story anyway! Singleton Thorpe was one of several villages overcome in the great flood of 1555 when the sea surged inland, almost to the line of the M6 motorway, so one version has it.

It was the end of the Forest of Amounderness, as the sea snapped oaks like twigs and farmers still turn them up in fields sometimes. The sea never retreated as far as it had started from and from then on (probably from before then) erosions steadily took parts of the Fylde coast every year. Singleton Thorpe was supposed to be about a mile and a bit further out from Thornton Cleveleys, although I've also seen it that it was off Bispham a mile from Pennystone Rock out to sea. Catherine Rothwell's web page (no longer online) has an account of an expedition looking for the remains of the village in 1893. They found a solitary cottage, which may suggest they were looking in the wrong place. There are plenty of tree stumps to be found off Cleveleys at a very low tide.

By the time the cliffs at Bispham were concreted over to protect them, they were falling at the rate of tens of feet per year. Just what shape England may have been in 1555 is likely to remain a mystery! Pennystone Rock was supposed to be close by a public house and had an iron ring fastened to it for horses to be hitched to whilst their owners had a drink. This is mentioned in "The Story of Blackpool", though the authors of that book couldn't confirm the existence of the ring.

I've never managed to reach Pennystone Rock, though I do have a photo of Carlin Rock with Bispham, well...Norbreck, in the background (shown above), and yet I still couldn't get to it because of a deeper channel of water. Pennystone Rock is about a half mile further out than Carlin I think. I freely admit to being less than an expert on this (who wants to be an expert anyway - an 'ex' is a has-been and a 'spurt' is a drip under pressure!) so if anyone knows any more, drop me an email or add a comment to this blog entry!

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A Bit of Rain...

Phew! I was in Sheffield yesterday at the AoC NILTA CIS Conference for managers of College Information Services.

If you are reading this from the UK, you will have seen the news images of the horrendous flooding. The rain was hammering on the windows and skylights of the hotel venue all day without any let-up.

Several of us were travelling back west from Sheffield and we got to a very crowded railway station to see rows of cancelled trains on the announcements board. Luckily we managed to get onto a train heading for Manchester, but it was a very slow journey home. The knock-on effects of so many cancelled trains was having its effect on trains all over the country and the second stage from Manchester to Preston was a journey of long waits before approaching stations.

Ironically, my final train from Preston to Blackpool was almost empty as can be seen above and it reached Blackpool as the sun came out and I could hardly believe how bad it had been until I got home 20 minutes later and saw the TV coverage.

There must have been a lot of people unable to get home - nothing was travelling south, we saw lots of very agitated people talking into mobile phones and huge queues of people at Sheffield forming in front of any railway official they could find.

For all that the conference seemed to go quite well. I delivered two workshops, one with my colleague Andrew Stewart on the use of Web 2.0 social software, concentrating on Wikis. Only a couple of the delegates in the session had tried it but we got some quite good discussion and ideas from them.

My other session was on Risk Management and that too stimulated a lot of interest.