Postings may be a bit erratic for a few weeks because of activity levels generally. I think there is every possibility we are going to tackle the kitchen makeover, a task postponed for 23 years, just. Money has been the problem but it looks as if we are going to do it ourselves. We both hope with the greatest sincerity that we are not going to end up as the subject of one of those TV programmes where the team rush in to rescue people who have lived in a building site for several years; in the pursuit of which laudable aim some midnight oil may be burned, especially by me, who is never the one to jack it all in and go off to the pub if it gets a bit tricky. Moreover the task must be complete by September at the latest to give time for getting ready for Miniatura, because when I pour porcelain I do it in the kitchen.
Do take advantage of the gismo that alerts you to postings, it says feeds just to the right of these words; I will post but not on the regular-ish Monday, Wednesday, Friday slots.
Meanwhile, I’ve been painting. Here’s my father, who will be 91 tomorrow
I am also half way through Mardol, a street in Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury, which, for the benefit of non-UK readers, is a town on the Welsh borders, has a long and interesting history. Like Warwick, where I live, it is one of the Anglo-Saxon burhs, defensive townships, invented by Alfred the Great as part of his battle strategy against Viking raiders. The burhs in the Midlands, old Mercia, were founded by his daughter Ethelfleda. She carried on her father’s fight singlehandedly after her husband died and was not only every bit as formidable as Mrs Thatcher in her day, she was loved by the people and called the Lady of the Mercians. She founded the towns, as did her father, in locations with natural advantages. Either they were former Roman towns with good supply routes, or previous Neolithic hill forts with ready-built defensive earthworks or they were places with fantastic geographical advantages. Typically, as at Shrewsbury and Warwick, these were places on a hill surrounded by the loop of a river. Ethelfleda must have had very good scouts; there is hardly a location surrounding the Midlands with such a river and hill that has been missed.
Having chosen the location and enclosed it with a wooden fence and gates, many of which survive in later building as stone gates to mediaeval towns, she established a cross roads at the centre, frequently the location of the later or contemporary stone cross and market square. The town plan spread out from the centre in a grid of roads, though in many cases the grid pattern breaks at the edges to follow the geographical contours. Mardol is such a street, curving picturesquely down a hill. It has a wonderful selection of buildings from all eras. As with nearly all the burhs, these places were so loved and lived-in for over a thousand years they have rarely suffered subsequently from wholescale town planning but have been adapted and amended over the years and often only crumbling buildings have been removed or roads enlarged that would otherwise only accommodate an ox cart. Consequently they are living shrines to the history of British architecture; down Mardol you can spot red brick Victorian buildings, whitened Georgian facades with their large regular windows and mediaeval timber frames with their jutting upper stories, a consequence of timber jointing technology that knew how to stagger the joint of the lower wall, the cross floor timber and the upper wall, for strength. All this variety surmounts a wonderful selection box of shop fascias from the forties to the present. I found a cracking fabric shop there, unsurprisingly; Shrewsbury having historically been the market place for textiles derived from the wool of all the Welsh hill sheep.
Lack of space in this crowded isle has been a gift to history students, anywhere with more room would have seen abandoned towns, as people moved on, anywhere with less would have caused more demolition. It would appear that here we have just the right amount of not enough space to cause ingenuity and thrift to come into play with very edifying consequences. I only hope the same will hold true for the kitchen makeover. Like Mardol, time will tell.
JaneLaverick.com – a bit of a walk through history.