Bartholomews Road Atlas - a work of art

  Some maps are more attractive than others. I've always preferred the old one mile to the inch Ordnance Survey maps to the modern 2cm to 1km ones; they just look nicer. And most road atlases are just boring overviews of roads, leisure attractions and towns, with plain white between them. But they weren't always like that.

   My dad had a Bartholomews road atlas. As a kid I would look at it for hours. It's a magical thing. Bartholomews are credited with inventing Hypsometric tints - using different colours to emphasise the contours, ranging from dark green for below sea level through yellows, greens, pinks and browns as the land rises. You can see at a glance where the hills and valleys are. It really gives you a feel for the look of the landscape. And the level of detail is astonishing - there are even lightships shown off the coast.

   They were always charmingly archaic - my 1971 edition has the major roads updated and the  Beeching railway cuts in place, yet the urban area looks to me like it hasn't been updated since the 1920's. The part of Offerton where I live is shown as open countryside.

Facades

  Some bits of buildings are worth more than others. Usually for historical or aesthetic reasons. And planning regulations - you know, those obstacles to progress that George Osborne wants to get rid of, at least in areas where poor people live -being what they are, the good bits have to be preserved.
  Usually its the facade that's worth keeping. Just look at the town hall - the front all gleaming portland stone, the back and sides predominately brick. So what usually happens is that the facade is left standing when the building is demolished, then a new building is bolted on in its place. But sometimes smaller bits are good enough.
  There's three good examples of preserving the best bits in Stockport that I can think of. Look across the road from the town hall and you'll see the grandiose facade of Stockport infirmary. Built in 1833, operations were transferred to stepping hill in 1996 but the huge neo - classical frontage was too good to lose. Now it fronts an office complex.

  Facing each other down the bottom end of merseyway are two other ways of dealing with the issue. . The Warren Bulkeley faced the Buck and Dog across Bridge Street. Both good pubs, sadly missed. They kept the Warren Bulkeley's facade, but moved it round the corner, where it now fronts the Laura Ashley shop.

  Look over the road, and all you'll see is Barclays bank. The poor old Buck and Dog wasn't worthy of  commemoration, it would seem. Except, if you walk round the far side of the bank, you'll see this...

...the pub's old doorway. It's a magnificent piece of stonework, and the buck's antlers are made of some kind of metal. The pub used to look like this, looming over the river like dracula's castle. Much the same inside, come to think of it. The clientele looked like they never saw daylight.

  Sometimes they can't find a use for the facade, though. If you go down Tib Street in Manchester you'll see this...

...which has been there for as long as I can remember.Just waiting for the right building to come along.
   

How Americans think - I think

Hayling Island

Your actual houseboats!

Blue sky, blue sea, blue lavender.

Art Deco golf club. Though built in 2002.

Wierd place, Hayling. Makes the Isle of Wight look bang up to date.

Bradford Town - sorry, City - Hall

I'm not keen on the term 'city hall' for a british local government headquarters. It sounds too american. Bradford has one - it was promoted from town hall in 1974, even though Bradford had been a city since 1897. You sense an attempt to apply some american glamour to a fading textile town. Manchester obviously didn't feel the need for such vanity, as our town hall followed the city charter.
Bradford's town - city - hall beats ours on two counts, though. It's got statues of English monarchs, thirty-five of them, from William the conqueror to Victoria. They line the walls in chronological order, gazing down on the peasants below, except Elizabeth and Victoria, who flank the main doors. Even Oliver Cromwell is there.

And the bells play tunes. Pretty much any tune, they reckon, thanks to some fancy software. When I was there, 'For those in peril on the deep' was echoing around the town, which must be at least forty miles from the coast. Wierd.

Not Stuffing

This isn't taxidermy. But it's damned impressive. Check it out here. It wouldn't look so good using lead slugs, though.

Terror weapons should LOOK terrifying. And preferably sound it too.

       These scary-looking beasts are Ju87 stuka dive bombers. Nazi Germany's premier terror weapon in their years of conquest. The best dive bomber in the world - british test pilot Eric Brown said it was "In a class of its own" - it dived almost vertically, delivering munitions with an accuracy unsurpassed until the advent of smart weaponry. With its fixed, spatted undercarriage and cranked wings it resembles a bird of prey stooping on its victim. It couldn't look more predatory if it was designed to. But the nazis reckoned that being dive bombed wasn't terrifying enough. Brutal crop-headed Luftwaffe generals like Wolfram Von Richtofen wondered, how can we make those fleeing columns of refugees REALLY scared?
        So they bolted on propeller-driven sirens, dubbed 'Jericho trumpets'. You can see one attached to the left undercarriage leg on the leading aircraft. The resultant howl has become a symbol of the blitzkrieg. Enough to freeze the blood of the helpless targets on the ground. You'll have heard it onscreen, as it become so iconic that you hear it dubbed onto film footage of any old aircraft crashing.
         Check it out here. And you'll also see where Francis Ford Coppola got the idea for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. And Joseph Beuys was the rear gunner in one.

         About the only modern contender for the stuka's crown is this...

...
...the russian MI24 'Hind' gunship. Not the most sophisticated attack helicopter in the world, but definately the scariest. It's got the predatory look, like a giant insect on the hunt. And it shares the stuka's awesome reputation for doling out death to helpless civilians. The soviets used them in Afghanistan, where a mujahideen fighter - yeah, the same ones that we're fighting today, now rebranded as the taliban - said "We do not fear the russians, but we fear their helicopters". And the sudanese are currently slaughtering hapless peasants with them in Darfur.
    Nukes and smart bombs are efficient enough. But they don't LOOK scary enough.They could at least paint shark's teeth on the missiles.