Forgotten Evangelicals

Blogger allows you to make draft postings and somehow this picture has been hidden away in the "draft" for so long I've forgotten what I was going to say about it (maybe something witty about fishers of men, or has that been done already?). So I thought I'll just leave it here and if anything comes to mind maybe I'll add it later. I can tell you this is in Bridlington and it's tucked away down a steep alley way close by the harbour but then you might guess that from the sign.

The weekend in Black and white is here.

Cottingham

"No one left and no one came

On the bare platform..."

The good ship Wikipedia informs me that Cottingham station was opened in the mid 1840s like so many stations, little and large, in this country. I learn that the place was actually designed by a real person, an architect no less (who knew?), George Andrews, I had thought these places just grew by themselves, organically, they all look the same, and that would be, I suppose, because the Boy George designed most of them ... I read that there were "two platforms, a stationmaster's house, and waiting rooms. In addition to the passenger facilities there was a goods shed, and coal depot to the west of the line, reached by points to the north of the station. Goods transit into Cottingham included coal and building materials, whilst goods outwards from Cottingham included large amounts of agricultural produce as well as livestock." 

Must have been quite a busy little place back then. Now it's more Adlestrop than King's Cross ...

Well there are still two platforms, the stationmaster's house is a listed building now though I wouldn't want to live there as there's no floor. The coal depot is no more, I think it's a builders' merchant store or it was, there were plans for a supermarket there (whatever happened to that I now wonder.) There are waiting rooms, that much is true and recently renovated too, but only on one platform and I've never seen anyone use them. The signal box is now a museum piece and goods traffic all goes by road these days and has done for decades. The footbridge remains as do a few dozen passengers each day who want to go to Bridlington or Scarborough or Hull and Sheffield, I believe there's a through train to London once a day but that might just be a myth. There's no ticket office, never has been while I've been here. A modern, somewhat intrusive, innovation is a fancy interactive ticket machine ignored by all; I always buy my ticket on the train ... 'cos sometimes the conductor doesn't turn up and a free ride is always fun.

The weekend in black and white is here.

Pier review

Bridlington pier attracts all sorts who bring along all the right gear to catch either the light or the odd passing codling or flounder ... I have a tripod, I just can't be bothered to traipse around with it.

These guys are not allowed to fish off here during the summer in case a passing tourist (there are still a few who pass) might be harmed by seeing grown folk waste their time in the pursuit of the big 'un. There must be some hidden thing I'm not getting, each one finds their own way through that gap twixt cradle and grave.

Please wait ... six months.

We went to Bridlington the other day. It was closed. Hibernating until well into next year, waiting for those glorious post-Brexit days, Armageddon, who knows? Anyway it was shut...

The Yorkshire Belle was where she always is, still going strong after taking folk on trips round the bay and sometimes further for must be over seventy years now. I know she had a refit in Hull recently and clearly needs to rest up.

The Gansey Girl statue and the ferris wheel were just made to go together so  ...

Harbour Wall

I was going to call this something like 'next stop Hamburg' since if you keep going East over that horizon you'll end up close to that place but then I guess no-one or very few from Hamburg these days thinks 'heh if go that-a-way I'll end up in Bridlington' well at least not for the past seventy five years or so... This was taken in October when by rights it should have been posted then but though the body was willing the spirit was weak ... Besser spät als nie as they might say over yonder ...


The City Daily Photo theme for January was 'Photo of the Year'; it's not too late to go have a look.

Audrey's x 2

Serving battered fried fish and chips must be a lucrative business as Audrey's in Bridlington seems to have doubled in size since I last noticed ...

Puffins

Well it's not quite a beautiful mosaic (not even close) but for a public convenience in Bridlington this brickwork doesn't look too bad at all. OK it's a bit clunky but at least they tried, come on ... c'est seulement un pissoir ...

Red Bridge

This much graffitied footbridge over the rail line to Bridlington connects Hotham Road North with Priory Drive (not with Hotham Road South, no sir, that would be too obvious). Although provision for cyclists to push their bikes is given most I saw chose to carry their machines up and over. As for the wheelchair bound amongst us ... well a long diversion I'm afraid unless you've got a very strong friend.

Margot took these while I stood in the rain and moaned.

Questions, questions

By the harbour side and no doubt as part of some tourist trail or other these two figures appear demanding answers. I'll start with the guy in the Arab head dress, T E Lawrence (of Arabia). It seems that after ruining the Middle East in WW1 he served in the RAF near Bridlington supervising the armour plating of power boats for target practice. I guess he was tired of all the heat and the camels. The other guy, well, that is Captain John Paul Jones of the Continental Navy. During what would nowadays be called 'hard Amexit' or some such aka the American War of Independence he took a small fleet across the pond and proceeded to cause a bit of mayhem in British waters. The Battle of Flamborough Head of 1779 rarely gets a mention these days especially now that the UK and US have a 'special relationship' and more especially since the British Royal Navy lost to a bunch of colonials so least said soonest mended.

A tale of two towers

I'm keeping out of the city of culture for a few days; they have taken to dancing in an old graveyard while stuffing their faces all the name of culture and it's not a pretty sight. So I return to Bridlington Priory and its two odd towers. It's looks on the face of it like it's the real deal; an old Gothic building with a perpendicular tower. Well partly. The church as it stands is the vestige of Bridlington monastery which would have looked a bit like this in the early 16th century. As you all know if you were still awake in history classes the monasteries in England were dissolved by HenryVIII. Now the Prior of this place decided to take part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rising in Yorkshire against Henry VIII which did not end well. The monastery quickly lost all its valuables and gradually fell into disrepair until only the nave remained standing and that in no good condition.  The pictures below show it in 1786 and 1842. Note there are no towers by the front entrance. So enter our old friend and saviour of fallen churches Sir Gilbert Scott and his passion for the Gothic revival and up rises one perpendicular Gothic tower in the 1870's and one stump of a tower as a permanent reminder not to trust planners ...

The rear view, those buttresses are all Victorian.

I came across this helpful little site on my travels

Bridlington Bayle's back door

Being too lazy to step back a bit in order to get the whole gateway in view I thought I'd just take half a dozen pictures and stitch them together with the rather skewed result you see. The bayle, as I mentioned ages ago, is the former gatehouse to Bridlington Priory. This is the back door, as it were, and it should look a bit like this.

Costa del Brid

You can achieve wonders by upping the saturation and artfully cropping out unwanted chip shop chimneys to give an almost Mediterranean look to a Bridlington snicket. 

There's going to be an election in June which apart from boring folk to death will return the present lot to government, destroy what's left of the Labour Party (not much), annoy the Scots and the Irish (no bad thing in itself) and solve no problem whatsoever. But then that's politics for you.

Renewables: the new blot on the landscape

Bridlington's south beach has a wonderful view of a wind farm which I suppose is a step up from the view from the beach near where I grew up, Hartlepool's very own nuclear power station (there were also steel works and petrochemical plants as well but they just seemed to blend in so well). That's progress for you.

Margot took this picture.

Building Tomorrow's Bridlington

You might think that having suffered two years of orange barriers in Hull you would be safe to take a day out and not come across any of these damn things. But no, it seems Bridlington is being regenerated as well which seems to mean knocking down a street of Victorian houses and digging up Bridge Street above. Maybe they'll get some culture too, we've got lots to spare.

A Seaside Terrace

Hard now to imagine the thousands who came to Bridlington for their annual holiday but the evidence of their visitations lies in these typical seaside lodging houses and hotels. This one has six storeys and all were no doubt priced accordingly. I'll take a wild guess that it was built in 1878. In those days holidays were unpaid and in the north of England whole towns would take a week off at one time, the Wakes Week,  and all would descend by train on the seaside; there was nowhere else to go. Nowadays everyone goes off on their own little adventure to the Med or Bali or California or where ever a plane can fetch up and these old places have become rented apartments not necessarily to the highest calibre of clientèle. Some seaside towns, not Bridlington especially,  have attracted the unemployed, and possibly unemployable, the homeless, folks with mental health problems, former prisoners and so on. I say 'attracted' some might say these people have been deliberately dumped on these places, cheap and out of the way. Naturally this is  bringing attendant social, drug and criminal problems. So though the sky is still blue and sea and the sand are just the same we've come a long way from the days of the bucket and spade holiday makers with their kiss-me-quick hats and sticks of rock.

It's like déjà vu, all over again

In those optimistic years of 2007/08 a Ferris wheel stood large and proud on Bridlington's north shore fun fair. It styled itself as the Bridlington Eye after the much (~3x) bigger London Eye. Well we all know what happened in 2008 but that had little to do with the demise of the Brid Eye that was due to poor weather and lack of visitors. So down it came but not before someone stole the engine or so I'm told. All that is so much history because now the same people are putting up yet another Ferris wheel slightly larger than the first and it's hoped to be running by Easter. Unlike the first one this one will have open gondolas so I expect they are really, really hoping for warm weather; those North Sea breezes can be very unforgiving even in Summer.

Anyhow as the Bridlington Eye v1.0 was up and down and gone before I started this blog I never posted about it. So here's an ancient pic taken in 2007 when I was still a young man with no grey hairs and had money in the bank ...

Big Blue Octopus

We set off to Bridlington under cold grey skies with showers of rain but arrived to clear blue skies and sunshine and quite warm really for April. I was looking around for something new to show and this kind of grabbed my attention. The legs wave about in a manner that would be menacing if it wasn't twenty foot off the ground.  It's part of pirate themed amusement arcade; well they call it amusement.

Eyes like saucers

I could do with a little tinder-box and few wishes being fulfilled at the moment but I don't suppose one is coming my way any time soon.

This hound was in a shop window in Bridlington oh so many months ago and has hopefully found a forever home by now. I believe his eyes light up and maybe he performs other tricks who knows? He looks harmless though.

Sailing By

This odd little installation in Bridlington features a transparency of an oil painting, the Great Gale of 1871 by local artist J T Allerston. If you are not from these parts you may not recognise the names surrounding and underneath the picture. These are the shipping forecast areas and to anyone who has listened to BBC Radio 4 as it closes down for the night they will be only too familiar. The forecast was (probably still is, I haven't listened for a while) usually preceded by a piece of light music entitled 'Sailing By'. That tune and the almost poetic recitation of the forecast following was enough to send most people off to sleep; a kind of national lullaby. Some, however, found the shipping forecast altogether more invigorating ... 

The Gansey Girl

On the north pier sits this recently installed (October last year) statue, the Gansey Girl, depicting a young woman knitting a traditional jumper or gansey for her fisherman sweetheart. It's part of the maritime trail which is apparently ten years old; how time flies. The sculptor was Steve Carvill.

I have since found out that the little fishes on the base carry the names of fishing families from Bridlington and nearby. If I'd known I'd have taken a close up but if you zoom in on this picture you might just be able to make out some names.

The weekend in black and white is here.