Cocktails and Records

In preparation for the long hot summer which I just know we’re going to be enjoying later this year, I’ve been reading Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out. I dare say that many of you will already be familar with this fab book about unusual tourist attractions in the UK. For those of you who aren’t, then look no further than these selected highlights to plan your 2009 holidays.

Places I’m lucky enough to have already been to and highly recommend:

1. Keith and Dufftown Railway. It’s a railway. It goes between Keith and Dufftown (in north east Scotland, just up from the Cairngorms) and it is a trip down memory lane to the errr…70s. This is because the train, run by a bunch of lovely railway enthusiasts, is an old diesel Intercity which wasn’t actually put into retirement all that long ago. For my part, I loved just being able to buy a mug of coffee and a cake on a plate from the station buffet and take it on train. Proper crockery on a train – fancy that?!
2. Bekonscot. I have mentioned this superb model village before and will refrain from going into it again. If you want to be reminded, see here. It really is a great day out.
3. Dennis Severs’ House. Dennis Severs was an American eccentric who bought up this Georgian house cheap in the 70s when everyone else thought that Spitalfields was a dump. Over the years he turned it into in an art installation, or less poncily, the imagined house of an imagined family, the Jervises. Dennis Severs’ House is the anti-V&A, you could say – Dennis knocked up a lot of the ‘antiques’ himself, little notes and bits of interpretation are stuck in random places, it’s almost pitch black inside, they do virtually no marketing, are hardly ever open, and children and chatter are not encouraged. It’s ace.
4. Cumberland Pencil Museum. My family and I went to Cumbria when I was a tiresome teenager. What do I remember most about the trip? Quaint cottages and stunning scenery? Clambering over drystone walls while out walking the fells? Don’t be stupid. It’s the the worlds biggest pencil at Cumberland Pencil Museum and discovering the fascinating story of how pencils are made.

Places I’m dying to go to:

1. Kelvedon Nuclear Bunker. Although I suffer from slight claustrophobia, it is not putting me off wanting to see the very nuclear bunker where our illustrious leaders would have run Britain from had Russia pushed the button. Apparently 600 ‘key personnel’ could have lived and worked in the bunker and you can see where they would have slept, cooked, washed and wondered what the heck they would do next. Excellent.
2. Keith Harding’s World of Mechanical Music. This collection of music boxes, musical clocks, pianolas and old gramophones seems like the perfect day out for the sort of person who loves museums and music, and who is so talentless that they have to rely on mechanical music for their entertainment. Like me, for example.
3. A la Ronde.  I’ve always had a soft spot for eccentrics and follies, so this 16-sided house in Devon looks like just my kind of thing. It was built in the 1790s by two spinster cousins to house the formidable collection of souvenirs that they’d collected during a 10 year Grand Tour of Europe. The cousins then decorated the interior themselves with shells, peacock feathers and seaweed. It might be a cleaning nightmare for the National Trust, but sounds perfect to me.
4. Port Sunlight. Ever since reading about Port Sunlight in Bill Bryson’s Notes from A Small Island nine years ago I’ve been curious about this model factory town set up by soap baron William Hesketh Lever in the 1890s. Like the Barbican, I admire any place which seeks to combine lofty utopian ideals, social engineering and ’statement’ architecture. At least they’re trying.

And have any of you ever been to the Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee? It’s not quite on my ‘dying to go’ list, but I am intrigued…

For more top days out see: www.nothingtoseehere.net

Tags: go see this

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 11:06 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.