Base Camp Journal - West Midlands
It’s been a few months since I last had time to post anything here, as things had been so busy of late.
In March we spent a few days exploring the West Midlands - we didn’t want to travel too far, with Bertha having been in storage since October. Some of the places outside Birmingham are historically interesting.
Warwick CMC site is quite unusual, being quite small, and within the perimeter of a race course. Our ‘pitch’ was on solid concrete, in what appeared to be a car park, but that didn’t bother us much, because the site’s right next to the town. A few hundred metres down one street, there is the Vivaanta Indian restaurant and the Castle Inn pub, and we frequented both during our stay. The town square is a few minutes’ walk up a slight hill in the other direction.
Sure enough, something did go wrong with Bertha. This time it was the flush rotor that seized up, and possibly caused the fuse to burn. Fixing that was easy, as the subsystem is just a wire running from the power supply, through a fuse box, to the rotor. Simply prise off the flush and lever panel, remove the small blue rotor housing from the well, and use a very thin screwdriver to get the rotor blades turning in both directions.
Warwick
The town is so picuresque, interesting and full of history, with more Tudor-era buildings than Tewkesbury, that one could spend an entire day exploring it.
Between 09:00 and 13:00, the town square is occupied by market stalls, most of them selling artisan food and hand-crafted things. I browsed a relatively large antique shop, which sold mostly items that would have been cheap accessories in 1950.
The Lord Leycester is probably the oldest building in the town, other than the castle, having been contructed in the late-1400s. It once functioned as a hospital, and now serves as a museum and residency for veterans. Climbing the steps from there, we entered a small, empty chapel, above the West Gate - apparently that was built around 1150, and restored about 200 years later.
On the other side of the chapel was a door that opened to a path between the town wall perimeter and the Tudor Gardens - the wall was manned by Roundhead soldiers during the English Civil War, and some of those soldiers were given their own sections of land to cultivate there. Basically it was an allotment. It’s impossible to determine where the rest of the wall would have been, from the buildings that are currently there.
Across the road from the Lord Leycester Hospital is a lane - Back Street, I think it was called - that leads to the grounds of Warwick Castle. The admission price is £30, but we couldn’t enter with the Chihuahua.
Stratford-Upon-Avon
Just a few miles south, on the other side of the M40, is Stratford-Upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born and died. My understanding is that not much is known of his life in between.
The first thing we encountered in Stratford, after parking up near the harbour, was a long line of food and craft stalls, and it was exremely busy. The harbour was the nice part of the town, with canal and touring boats moored along the Avon. The water was a horrible brown colour, since it rained heavily the night before.
Stratford-Upon-Avon also has many historical buildings, but it’s a little run down beyond the high street. Along a high street, we found the house where Shakespeare was born and raised. It’s a visitor centre and museum now, a reconstruction of how the home would have appeared.
The home is more like an estate, with a generously sized house and garden, though it can’t really be called a mansion. It’s one of those old houses in which one needs to pass through a series of rooms to get wherever, because there isn’t a passageway.
Shakespeare’s father was a mayor, or somesuch, and ran a glove making and repair business that was apparently successful enough. Apparently the house became a pilgrimage site for other renowned authors, including Charles Dickens, who was himself involved in the campaign to preserve the it as a site of historical interest.
All the known works of Shakespeare, and compendiums of them, plus historical literature, are available in the shop.
Leicester
Neither of us like driving into Birmingham, so we decided to visit Leicester, which is roughly 50Km north of Warwick. As it turned out, Leicester is a lot like Birmingham, and just as busy, but a little nicer.
After spending an hour or so on the high street, we happened upon the cathedral while heading toward a row of Tudor-style buildings that caught our attention. I say ‘happened upon’ because the cathedral looked very much like any late-19th century church in a city street. Never passing up the opportunity to visit whatever cathedrals we encounter on our travels, we went inside anyway.
I made straight for the stained glass windows, as I do whenever we visit a cathedral. Robby returned some moments later, as I was admiring a particularly captivating and vivid window.
‘Richard III is buried here!’, He said.
‘Are you sure you read that right?’, I asked. Westminster, or York Minster, yes, but a relatively small church down a side street, in a run down part of a city?
Robby directed me to a tomb, which looked like a block of sandstone on a black marble base. Despite its contemporary minimalist design - the kind of minimalist that I don’t attribute to artistic choice - it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. Sure enough, it contained what was left of Richard III, and it was almost ten years to the day since he’s been there!
I do remember the news coverage about his remains being discovered under a car park, and some of the revisionist history that came with it. The romanticised version of Richard III could be as fictional as Shakespeare’s, but I do know popular culture has an obsession with recasting villains, particularly the archetypal ones, as anti-heroes of their own stories.
The two princes he was widely believed to have murdered: They disappeared from history, and right under the noses of historians, leaving nothing but conspiracy theories circulating around London. For some reason the mystery still captures the imagination of TV producers, being the subject of sensationalist documentaries and digestible pop history, with different authors spinning their own narratives and plot twists that all miss the obvious. Not that we can learn anything of utility from it, in a world that’s changed so much over the past five hundred years.
Perhaps the fragmented answer to the mystery is yet to be collated from the parish records, the casually boxed journals and hearsay of those lived and died, over the centuries, in a town far from London.
Coventry
It’s commonly said the High Street is dead. Not in Coventry! The city is a pleasant hive of commerce, and we’d never seen so many shops, brands and independent cafes in one place, and there were only one or two vacant store fronts to be seen. The council (or whoever owns the precinct) had obviously invested in making the centre look interesting, and I’d imagine it would look vaguely nice if the sky wasn’t so dull and overcast.
There are a few historical places to see. Obviously we explored what’s left of the old cathedral, which was once a magnificent building reduced to a ruin during the German air raids in 1940. A larger cathedral was built next to it - the size is impressive, but the modernist design not very appealing.
Near the old cathedral, down a side street, we found The Golden Cross inn. That’s worth a mention because it was built in 1563, on the site of a mint, and the first mention of it as a public house was around a century later.