Ruth's birthday 2020

Friday 3 January

As per last year, we decided on an overnight stay in London and seeing something theatrical. We arrived in London early afternoon on the Friday and made our way over to the hotel to check in. We went out and sourced tea and cake at Cojean on Ludgate Hill. Then, as Ruth isn’t as keen as I am on just walking around in London with no clear aim in view, we had a look for somewhere specific to visit. Briefly considered St Paul’s, as it was nearby, but we’d left it too late by then as it only had half an hour to go before closing. We made our way to the Bank of England Museum, as Ruth thought it sounded moderately interesting and the internet had suggested it was free, but we arrived to find it closed (contra the internet, which had suggested that it was open). In a last-ditch attempt to go somewhere, we spotted the London Mithraeum on Google Maps, and my curiosity was piqued by the name so we went to have a look.

Turns out it’s the ruins of a Roman Temple of Mithras. The ruins are underneath Bloomberg’s European headquarters. We did a complete circuit of the Bloomberg building before locating the entrance. It’s clearly had money poured into it as it’s all beautifully done. At ground level there’s a contemporary art space, which when we visited was housing an exhibition of pieces by Daniel Silver called ‘Human Activity’ (one of the pieces above). There’s also a display of some Roman artefacts – apparently the excavations prior to the current Bloomberg building’s construction produced a large number of Roman finds. The exhibition also shows how the ground level in the City of London has changed (risen) quite dramatically over the centuries.

Going downstairs takes you to a darkened room with an audio narration talking about what’s known about Mithraism (not all that much) and the temple of Mithras on this site. On a lower level again are the reconstructed remains of the temple itself. These are enhanced by an audiovisual installation that’s pretty good. We were lucky and saw the ruins in the company of just one other couple, which made them more atmospheric.

The remains of the Temple of Mithras

Today’s exhibition is a recreation of the original structure discovered in the 1950s (a chance discovery on a WWII bomb site). After its discovery, the ruin was dismantled (for reasons I didn’t quite get) and ‘reconstructed’ about 100 metres away, but this 50-60s reconstruction seems to have been viewed as a bit of a hatchet job. The present-day reconstruction follows Bloomberg’s acquisition of the site in 2010, and was done in consultation with conservation specialists. The latest reconstruction is close to the original position and level of the temple.

We’d booked an early pre-theatre dinner at the Cork & Bottle wine bar, having been there before for lunch and liked it. Although we thought we’d allowed plenty of time for the walk there, finding the place proved a headache and led to a lot of swearing at Google Maps. We were also thrown as Maps took us to the official entrance on Cranbourn Street, while on both our previous visits we’d been in via the other entrance on Bear Street, resulting in us standing around for a while just outside the door without seeing it. By the time we got in we were about 15 minutes late and weren’t optimistic that they’d have held our booking – the young waitress did tell us she’d just given away a small table but seated us in some sort of wine cellar-esque alcove, bigger than we needed but quite cosy, and we were just happy to be seated. We had a lovely dinner: we both had the beef carpaccio followed by schnitzel with capers. We even had dessert; I had the Hokey Pokey ice cream; I forget what Ruth had.

Ruth at the Cork & Bottle

Ruth had taken a while to decide on a show to see in the evening, but had eventually decided to get tickets for The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre. The Fortune is a fairly diddy theatre, with undoubtedly the smallest ladies’ toilets I’ve ever come across. It was apparently once described as “this most intimate of theatres”.

The Woman in Black has been running in the West End since 1989, and is apparently the second longest running non-musical play in West End history, after The Mousetrap. The play has only three actors, and one of them (the woman playing the Woman of the title) doesn’t speak. On the night we saw it, the play featured Stuart Fox and Matthew Spencer in the speaking parts. It’s based on a novel by Susan Hill, which I haven’t read but Mum says she has. In adapting Hill’s novel for the stage, the playwright (the late Stephen Mallatratt) opted to make it a play within a play (the play opens inside an empty theatre where the lead character Arthur Kipps, now an old man, is getting coaching from an actor in reading aloud his life story). I couldn’t quite decide if I liked that aspect of it.

In general the play was enjoyable, and they do quite a good job of making it scary though frankly that is a bit challenging. The second half wasn’t enhanced by the young couple to my right munching their way loudly through a bucket of popcorn – since when do theatres sell popcorn? We both vowed to complain to the theatre about it afterwards but I don’t think either of us has got around to it.

We got lost again walking the barely a mile back to our hotel, completing a day of useless navigation.

The following morning we checked out and walked back to Covent Garden where we had breakfast at the Carluccio’s on Garrick Street. After this, Ruth was keen to get home but I wanted to make a bit more of our time in London, so she went off and I took a meandering walk back to Paddington, via a visit to Innerspace, where I bought a book that probably won’t make me a better person, but it’s a nice thought, and via the Marble Arch M&S where I bought some sourdough bagels from the bakery counter.

Walk around Buckingham

11 January 2020

Walk with Ray, of just over four miles. We could have just driven to Buckingham, but instead took the train from Wolverton to Milton Keynes Central (only about a five minute journey) and then (after some cold standing around) took the Arriva X60 service from the station. On arrival we warmed up with tea at the Meadow Row Tea Rooms, and I had a piece of shortbread while Ray had a pasty.

One of the leaflets we picked up claims that Buckingham is located in the ‘Green Heart of England’ – I’m not sure if that’s a thing or just some romantic notion. As the name suggests, Buckingham was at one point the county town of Buckinghamshire, from the creation of the county in the 10th century to the early 18th century, when Buckingham’s fortunes slumped a bit - presumably not helped by the town centre burning down - and Aylesbury took over. See Dave’s recent piece on county towns.

Buckingham’s town centre is attractive in a cramped olde-worlde way (spending significant time in Milton Keynes tends to make other towns feel cramped). The High Street is dominated by the Old Gaol, built in the mid-eighteenth century and, as the name suggests, originally a prison but now housing, among other things, a tiny visitor information office, where we popped in and picked up a few leaflets.

The Old Gaol

We set out to do the Circular Walk, from an excellent little leaflet with some charming artwork:

Much of the walk follows the River Great Ouse, which was extremely full on the day of our walk though was at least running within its banks – the state of some of the paths and the grass suggested recent flooding. The route goes down Ford Street, which ends in a footbridge over the river. We assumed from the name that there was also a ford here at one point.

Possible former ford

The walk turns left just before the footbridge and passes through Chandos Park. The leaflet advised us that the Marquess of Chandos was one of the titles of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos¹.

We crossed the river by Tanlaw Mill and followed the path down past The Flosh, a weir, and then up onto Station Road. Apparently The Flosh is supposed to look like this - there was far more water going over it on the day we saw it.

We turned left up Station Road to join the Railway Walk – this is only about 1.5km in length and runs between Tingewick Road and the A421, which bypasses Buckingham to the south. There’s no evidence now of the station buildings, as these were all demolished, but Ray did spot some evidence of a platform. There are some old pictures here including one of the station forecourt. Buckingham evidently used to be a stop on the Banbury to Verney Junction branch line. The line joined the (also former) Varsity Line at Verney Junction.

The railway walk

The Circular Walk turns left along the perimeter of some school playing fields before coming out onto London Road. We crossed and chose to follow the alternative route, via Badgers Way, to avoid getting too muddy.

After crossing the river at Bourton Park we decided to take a detour onto the Ouse Valley Way to try to locate the restored bit of the Buckingham Canal. The Buckingham Canal was in fact the Buckingham Arm of the Grand Union Canal, joining the latter at Cosgrove. The story of its fortunes is the usual canal story: it lost trade to the railway, then became silted up so boats stopped using it. There’s a Buckingham Canal Society working on rewatering as many bits of it as they can.

By the rewatered canal section at Bourton Meadow

We did successfully locate the rewatered Bourton Meadow section and walked along it as far as the watered section goes. The restored section ends at a house – possibly a former lock cottage – that’s at some point been extended over the course of the old canal. You can continue to follow the path of the old canal as the Ouse Valley Way follows it as far as Thornton, but rather than make a long detour we retraced our steps back and followed the path along the river back into the town centre, where we had lunch at the King's Head.

Our route shown in red below. The straggly bit in the upper right of the map is our detour to locate the canal:

¹  Sidebar: this family were possessors of a quintuple-barrelled surname (Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville). Phew. The dukedom became extinct when the 3rd Duke died in 1889 sans male issue (though he did have three daughters, the eldest of whom was able to inherit one of her father’s subsidiary titles, the lordship of Kinloss, which could apparently be held by females. Who knows how these things work.).