Walking the Walks

One of the tree lined walks in the Walks, King's Lynn.

In this brief interlude between two phases of non-existence it really seems otiose to have favourites that may, like us, be here today and disappoint tomorrow. Despite this City Daily Photo in what it assures us is its very last first day of the month thing has chosen 'favourite photo' for its theme. Is this a favourite photo? Meh! It'll do for now; until the next one.

Just some trees

Here we're back in King's Lynn in the Walks. Peeking out the background is that old Red Mount Chapel but the trees in their late winter finery are the stars here.

The Red Mount Chapel

This I've posted before (here and here) and well here it is again. If you don't like it you know what to do.

The New Walk

Early in the 18^th century someone had the bright idea to construct a walk or mall from the town eastwards across uncultivated, vacant and I'm guessing somewhat swampy land to the Guannock Gate then part of the town walls. It was hardly a long slog being just some three hundred or so yards long but then maybe folk had not made a fetish out of walking as essential to a healthy body and mind but as a means of getting from A to B if you didn't have a horse and cart to help you. Here if you had stuff to strut was where it could be strutted outwith the grime of the town, with ruined walls and meandering Gaywood River to view it was akin to a country park in an urban setting. Anyhow it was the start of something as the New Walk was improved, lined with fine trees, and later a second walk crossed it and then more walks were added as the thing spread out beyond the now demolished town walls. I write all this trivia because I wondered why the place wasn't called something like Le Strange Park or Losinga Gardens or after some other notable local bigwig, it's called the Walks because, though now it may look like a park and walk like a park it is, historically, a collection of walks. So now you know.
By way of comparison Hull when it finally spilled out of its walls in the late 18^th century it dug a big hole and filled it with water; it was the biggest dock in the country, the Queen's Dock. Hull did not get a public park until the 1860s courtesy of gun-running property developer Zach Pearson. However the Queen's Dock is now Queen's Gardens ... with walks.

The Walks are lined with lime trees and horse chestnuts. Somebody has carved this out of a dead one.

Framingham's Hospital, King's Lynn

First sight I thought this looks a veritable old building but doing this blog has taught me nothing is ever quite what it seems. A wee plaque, so often my source of information, explains how the expansion of the cattle market drove the building of these replacement Tudor style almshouses in 1848.  Despite, or perhaps because of, being at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution our Victorians were seemingly so backward looking stylistically. 

Anyhow here it is close by the entrance to the Walks, opposite the Library and near where the town mill would have stood that I mentioned yesterday. A cattle market in the centre of town may have had a certain financial appeal to overcome the obvious odorous downside but it closed down long ago; that space is now the bus station in the modern-Elizabethan style.

Those twiddly bits and fancy windows could have paid for a building twice the size ... but reason not the need, eh!

Guannock Gate, The Walks, King's Lynn

If you spin around from where yesterday's post was taken you'll come across this handsome arch cum folly cum historical reconstruction that I showed before at night.

I'll post again a link to more about this here.

Bandstand, The Walks, King's Lynn

Wouldn't you know it, you post one bandstand and along comes another; this one in the Walks. This is on what looks like an island surrounded by the much abused Gaywood River, a special place given a special name: Vancouver Garden after George Vancouver who, well why not let the plaque do the talking ...

From what I gather this place in the Walks is the site of an open air swimming pool now long gone.

Under the Mistletoe

Well I'd been in and around the Walks before but somehow I'd not noticed that just about every other big tree had huge fuzzy globes at their tops. Weird, alien looking things still green while all the leaves have long gone. It is, of course, Mistletoe (Viscum album or white sticky stuff ... ). I've never seen anything quite like it, there was just loads of the stuff. What makes this King's Lynn park such a fine place for these hemiparasitic plants I can't imagine but both hosts and guests are definitely doing well.

 

Somewhere like King's Lynn ...

Red Mount Chapel, The Walks, King's Lynn

A man that is tired of London, said some wag, is tired of life, to which I add that a man that is tired of Hull has come to his senses. Hull is a well known dump, the ultimate crap town (accept no substitutes), run by petty minded, petulant jumped up jack-in-offices. I hate the sodding place, I'm sick of it and its gridlocks, its failing services, it's depressing shitty little town centre, its pathetic attempt to be a city, nay a city of culture ... pah to hell with it all. I should leave (should have left years ago), go somewhere, anywhere that doesn't depress, irritate and bore me to death. Somewhere like King's Lynn, perhaps.

This little folly, the Guannock Gate,  has been carefully moved, rebuilt and plonked here as a feature in the Walks. In the city of culture a similar town gate is now a demolished, despoiled and despised hole in the ground, a place where litter and louts and their odious offspring accumulate.

The Red Mount Chapel

Taken by Margot K Juby

On our way to Morrisons for some late night shopping we passed this little beauty in the Walks. I won't bore you with the history of this place just say it's an amazing survivor through some turbulent times and has been recently restored and is open to the public though obviously not at nine o'clock on a September evening. Hopefully we'll be back for a better look round sometime.