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DANA HUNTLEY
IT WAS A TYPICALLY GRAY AND MISTY DAY in the Home Counties as I set out this autumn with stories to tell, pictures to capture and people to meet. It’s the kind of road trip I’ve always called the “unexpected adventure.” With an outline of appointments and destinations to mark the byways, the road trip’s real joys lie in the unplanned meetings, the hasty detours, the spur-of-the-moment decisions and the unknown opportunities that lie everywhere along the way in our sceptered isle.
The cloudiness of the weather was matched by the public mood of the country. Flush from crucial rises in the polls, Britain’s new PM dithered over whether to call an election before this year’s end. Gordon Brown’s honeymoon, however, appears to be over. At the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool, leader David Cameron’s extemporaneous keynote address rang true with a jaundiced electorate and gave the Tories renewed strength in the polls. Brown took the mickey from the media and talking heads when he reversed course on the election and adopted key Conservative positions in his next budget. It looks now like the election will wait until 2009.
Verulamium was the third-largest town in Roman Britain. I’d never been to visit. In our own era, it’s the bedroom city of St. Albans, sitting just outside the northern arc of the M25 in Hertfordshire. The story of Verulamium is told at the eponymous Verulamium Museum, in a large park to the western edge of the city center. It’s a great visit, with interpretive and interactive exhibits detailing every aspect of life in Roman Britain, built around the archaeological digs there in St. Albans. The parkland itself covers much of the ancient metropolis, with standing Roman walls and intricate, colorful floor mosaics preserved in situ.
A stroll around the park’s duck ponds leads to the precinct of St. Albans Cathedral. St. Albans, the story goes, was England’s first Christian martyr, put to death there for his uncompromising Christian belief in the years before Rome embraced the new faith. The site of his martyrdom is commemorated with the great abbey church, long since a cathedral. Alas, as great medieval cathedrals go, St. Albans is a comparatively bland visit architecturally and historically, and thus does not show up on the popular list of such tourist destinations.
On the other hand, the cathedral of St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Andrew, up in Peterborough, shares much the same fate most undeservedly. After a soggy tromp around St. Albans, I ended the day in Peterborough, about an hour and half’s drive up the A1 (the Great North Road). The Bull Hotel on Westgate has long been a favorite stay of mine. It’s got all the best features of an in-town 3-star hotel, with lots of old, dark wood, a friendly lounge bar and a great English breakfast. Best of all, the Bull is right adjacent to Peterborough’s pretty, pedestrianized city core, and directly across the street a neat Victorian arcade leads into Queensgate, one of Europe’s most award-winning indoor shopping malls.
Peterborough Cathedral, just a block into the downtown piazza, is unjustly overlooked by the pundits and deserves a place in the first tier of great English medieval cathedrals. The western gate and tidy compact Close framing the magnificent stonework of the West Front are as beautiful as any in Christendom. Peterborough’s parqueted and embossed wooden nave ceiling is one of the longest in Europe. Another former abbey church, it has been known as the cathedral of two queens, though the designation no longer applies. Queen Katherine of Aragon lies in the north aisle. Mary, Queen of Scots, beheaded at nearby Fotheringay Castle, was buried in the south aisle, until her son, King James I, had her translated to Westminster Abbey.
North to Lincolnshire
THE SKIES WEREN’T MUCH BRIGHTER the next morning as I turned farther north for Lincolnshire. Since I was heading for the western shore of The Wash, I routed up through the Fens to Spalding. This is the flat, black, rich land of Britain’s market gardens, reclaimed from the peat bogs and marshes that were the undrained fenland. I had met traveling companions, longtime British Heritage readers (and old friends) Tad and Norm Berkowitz. We detoured off to Crowland for a quick visit to Croyland Abbey, a huge old abbey church with exposed stone arches, and Crowland’s extraordinary ancient triangular bridge, a relic of the pre-drained fens, when any fenland village was an island.
The broad, dark fields around Spalding are famed for their spring bulb flowers. We stopped at Springfields, a new commercial venture combining festival gardens and outlet shopping. The huge garden center overshadowed the Marks & Spencer and Clarks shops. The extensive theme gardens, designed by some of Britain’s best garden architects, would be more stunning in May than they were in an autumn drizzle.
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DANA HUNTLEY
Whether you are shopping or traveling, though, Britain is expensive these days. With the exchange rate hovering above $2 a pound, the cost of goods and services comes with sticker shock for the unprepared. At present rates, petrol costs now $8 a gallon. A steak and ale pie and a pint of beer at the lunchtime pub can run to $20. Hotel rooms, admissions and those favorite goodies we love to bring home with us are correspondingly dear. As always, prices are enhanced in London and moderate somewhat in the countryside. It is a time to be prepared and use time-honored cost-containing strategies.
I spent two nights at the White Hart Hotel in the Lincolnshire market town of Boston. The handsome Georgian inn sits right on the old bridge across the River Witham from the market square, and from St. Botolph’s Church. Preparations are well under way to celebrate St. Botolph’s 700th anniversary in 2009. Known ubiquitously as “The Boston Stump,” St. Botolph’s is the largest parish church in England. The “stump” of its 272-foot-tall lantern tower can be seen for miles across the fens. While we were in the neighborhood, we saw another favorite old cathedral of mine on an afternoon drive up to Lincoln.
A Norfolk Idyll
WHEN I TURNED THE PERKY Peugeot south, it was just around the Wash into Norfolk. Migrant workers were harvesting leeks in the fields, and the next crop of brussel sprouts for English Christmas dinner tables looked right on schedule.
We stopped by to visit Stuart Gilles, the associate director at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse, the Museum of Norfolk Life near Dereham. I wanted to return a visit Stuart paid to Virginia this spring when he and I spent an evening in March Madness and my local pub. We had a smashing afternoon at this eclectic, open-air museum of social history. The tea room turned out a world-class ploughman’s lunch, and I came away with another terrific story.
From Dereham, it was a quick hop east over to Norwich, one of my favorite medieval cities. In its heyday as a hub of wool export and continental trade, Norwich was the second or third city in the kingdom. While the city has slipped comfortably into its more provincial role as a county seat and regional center, its old-world air and ancient glories survive. We put up at the Maids Head Hotel on Tombland, just outside the gates of Norwich Cathedral. The 15th-century hostelry was under refurbishment, but I suppose that’s happened a few times since Queen Elizabeth I stayed there.
At the Maids Head, as well as everywhere else across England, the doorways front and back are the refuge of smokers. The country is still uneasily adjusting to the summer’s ban on smoking in all indoor public spaces. The nation is trying to go cold turkey. With a measurably higher percentage of adult smokers than in the United States and a culture that’s been far more hospitable to smoking generally, the results were bound to be rocky. Pubs, hotels, restaurants and anywhere that wants to retain its popular custom have tarted up outdoor smoking areas for their clientele. Through the milder climes of summer and autumn, everyone has gotten by reasonably well. Whether the same will be true in the dark, dank months of winter remains to be seen.
It was a quick stop in Norwich. I did get to saunter in light and sparkling Norwich Cathedral, walk the cobbled precinct of medieval Elm Hill and pay a visit to Norwich’s magnificent market. England’s largest permanent semi-outdoor market is an unforgettable kaleidoscope of colors and goods. British Heritage writer and old friend Lizzie Meadows came in from nearby Brooke for a visit and a meal of risotto and pasta at Caffe Uno on Tombland. You can catch her story on visiting the stateliest of stately homes in our next issue.
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DANA HUNTLEY
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DANA HUNTLEY
The next destination on the agenda was Kent. That meant an easy day’s drive down across East Anglia, through Suffolk and Essex, to the Dartford Crossing over the River Thames. We routed down the A140 to Diss and stopped at the British Bird of Prey Centre in Stonham Aspal. The specialty seems to be owls. The rest of the compound is that odd, tatty amalgam of English free enterprise: a mishmash of shops, a reptile house and a nine-hole golf course with greens fees of 5 quid.
Then, we detoured into the Stour Valley, so I could show Norm and Tad some of the Constable scenes from Jean Paschke’s recent story (see “The Stour Valley,” January ’08). It was amazing how many people manage to find their way down the country lanes to Flatford Mill on a damp, gray October afternoon.
In Dickens’ World
DARTFORD CROSSING is how one gets by land from north to south of the Thames anywhere east of metropolitan London. The south side of the river is a traffic mess, attempting to bring order out of the with continuous roadworks at meeting of the M25, M20, M2 and A2. There was no escaping the congestion as we circled the metropolis that Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham have grown together into. But this is also Charles Dickens country, and that’s why I was there.
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DANA HUNTLEY
Aside from politics (I think), the papers and newscasts are giving constant, if lackluster, coverage to the Princess Diana inquest—that is expected to continue for months. The country seems genuinely wearied of the topic, and I heard no reference to the event in the streets or pubs. Far more exciting was England’s surprise showing in the Rugby World Cup, that quadrennial display of international guts held this year in France. National pride and enthusiasm was omnipresent as England clawed its way through the rounds, beating host team France in the semifinals for a place in the championship game.
I got the story I came for in Chatham and Rochester, and Sunday afternoon took a drive over to Canterbury. The ancient gateway city to England remains one of the most fun old pedestrianized downtowns to leisurely explore. We got there just in time to hear choral evensong in majestic Canterbury Cathedral, with the clear, ethereal tone of the treble choirboys ringing through the cavern of Bell Harry Tower. I routed back through pretty Chilham and half a dozen villages that could have been the setting for The Darling Buds of May.
The next day it was time to face London. We took a morning detour up onto the marshy peninsula east of Gravesend. I was hunting for the graveyard at Cooling where Pip meets Magwitch in the opening scene of Great Expectations. Then, just up the single-track road, we hiked out on the RSPB reserve at Northward Hill, where herons and sundry marsh birds dominate the wetlands of the Thames estuary.
It doesn’t make sense these days to drive in to central London, between the congestion and the congestion charge. I dropped the car in Dartford and took the train into Charing Cross. After any road trip around our green and pleasant land, London always seems busy and cosmopolitan. It is, but then, London is always another story.
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