Edinburgh

Edinburgh #1

I'm afraid I'm now going to unload all my holiday spam... I spent a few days in Edinburgh last week. I used to work there a lot at one time (a good thirty years ago!) so I have many memories from there but we never used to get time to explore the city. I did once go to the Edinburgh Festival, which was amazing. It seems a lot busier these days, with lots of American, French and German tourists, and huge numbers of young Chinese - students?, influencers? 

The train journey seemed long but travelling through York, Durham and along the Northumberland coast means it is one of the more beautiful train lines in the country. I arrived in the early afternoon and concentrated initially on exploring the Old Town, where the Royal Mile runs down from Edinburgh Castle to Holyroodhouse. I didn't have long enough to walk its full length, so I went uphill, past St Giles Cathedral. The High Street is wide and cobbled, flanked by historic buildings and thronged with tourists and Scottish 'tourist tat' - more tartan scarves, highland cow stuffies, kilts and whisky than you ever want to see! It has wonderful views over to the coast, the Firth of Forth.  

The whole of Edinburgh is very hilly, and there are narrow alleyways (closes) and steps branching off the main artery. The street plan is labyrinthine, much of it conforming to the medieval plan but then extended from the late 18th century. 

There are some imposing statues, like this one of Walter Montagu Douglas Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch in Parliament Square. There's also one of Adam Smith, economist, philosopher and author of 'The Wealth of Nations' (see my second photo above).  

I wandered down Victoria Street, instagram famous for its brightly coloured shops. It's said to be the inspiration for Diagon Alley in J K Rowling's Harry Potter books - and there was a long queue outside the Harry Potter merchandise store. 

Nearby on George IV Bridge you can see what was the Elephant House Café, where Rowling wrote some of her books. It was damaged in a fire in 2021 and has yet to reopen. 

At the bottom of Victoria Street/West Bow, Bow Well dates back to 1674, built to supply drinking water for the Grassmarket, one of Edinburgh's main market places since 1477. As a gathering point for market traders and cattle drovers, the Grassmarket was traditionally a place of taverns, hostelries and temporary lodgings, rough and poor. It's only relatively recently that it has been 'gentrified'.

At the bottom end, there's a fine view of the back of Edinburgh Castle, which towers over the city, perched on a plug of volcanic rock. (My first photo is taken from a famous viewpoint known as the Vennell Steps.) 

Sunday calm

Here are a few more photos from my recent walk at Bolton Abbey. It was a calm, damp but relatively warm day. The famous view (known as Turner's View because JMW Turner painted it) was as pretty as ever, though very hazy.

The arch through the Nidd Aqueduct framed some lovely autumn colour. 

After a dry summer, the recent rain has encouraged moss and toadstools. I am not very good at identifying fungi but I suspect these are common Sulphur Tufts that grow on old tree stumps. The little grouping here was rather prettily arranged. 

The level of the river rises and falls very quickly, depending on the rainfall further upstream. It wasn't all that full on the day I visited, so the arches of Bolton Bridge looked really high. 

It's a narrow bridge, only one car width across and steeply arched, so crossing it on foot can be a bit scary. Thankfully there are little triangular inlets above the piers, so there is room to avoid the traffic. Climbing the ancient steps from the river bank also needs care, as you step out through the wall right onto the narrow road. 

The Bolton Abbey estate is scattered with farms and other residences, many occupied by estate workers. The farmhouse on the hillside above the river was covered in rich red Virgina Creeper. 

Bradford memorials

Between Bradford's Alhambra Theatre and the Science and Media Museum, there is a small memorial garden. It contains a grand statue of Queen Victoria by Alfred Drury, cast from 3 tons of bronze and standing 12 feet high, flanked by two stone lions. It was unveiled in 1904, after her death in 1901. 

In front of this is the large civic war memorial and some smaller commemorative stones. The main cenotaph was erected in 1922 to commemorate the 37,000 Bradford men who served in the First World War. Many men in the 'Bradford Pals' battalions died in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. 

On the same site, there are 'Public Standards of Length' gauges, installed in 1913. Britain's official standards of weight and length were originally kept in the Palace of Westminster and were lost in a fire in 1834. The Astronomer Royal, George Airey, was charged with restoring the standards and decided to disseminate them across the country in publicly accessible sites, so that people could check their measuring chains and yard rules. The first were installed in Greenwich in 1859. It took longer for them to appear in the industrial powerhouses of the North. WWI got in the way of the trend and anyway, by the turn of the 20th century, chains were being superseded by steel tapes and slip gauges that were more accurate and less prone to stretching. So the measures remain as interesting but ultimately obsolete objects.

The Turner Prize 2025 #2

Zadie Xa's work was bright, colourful, immersive. The floor was a mirrored gold material (you had to take your shoes off to go in) that reflected and amplified all the colour and pattern. There was also a soundtrack (which I couldn't really make sense of with my hearing impairment) but apparently included the sounds of the sea, whale song, ticking clocks and fragments of dystopian text. There were recurring motifs of shells and sea creatures, with a hanging shell-like form made of shamanic bells.

You know my love of colour and stained glass and here was a richness that was almost overwhelming. It struck me in some ways as being a bit 'overthought', though I enjoyed the exuberance of it. 

The one I liked least of the four exhibits was Rene Matic's autobiographical installation, questioning identity, culture, society and how we find a sense of belonging. It consisted of photos, flags (No Place... For Violence) and a bizarre collection of old, damaged and broken black dolls. I couldn't decide whether I was supposed to feel sorry for them, or offended by them as symbols of patronising colonialism. I'm afraid I found this all rather uncomfortable, ugly, angry and jarring and a bit 'teenage' - as I was no doubt meant to! Compared to the others, it seemed to me to have little 'artistic' merit/skill, being rather a commentary on modern life. 

It'll be interesting to see which one wins the prize of £25,000 - life-changing money for an artist, no doubt. The runners-up get £10,000 each, not to be sniffed at. 

The Turner Prize 2025 #1

As part of Bradford City of Culture 2025, Cartwright Hall has the honour of hosting the prestigious Turner Art Prize. Awarded annually by the Tate Gallery, The Turner Prize showcases and celebrates 'the most exciting new developments in British art'. The prize is awarded to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation in the preceding year. The four shortlisted artists this year are: Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa. (The prize winner will be announced in December.) 

Of course I went along, not sure what I'd find as it has a reputation for being fairly avant garde. (Past recipients have included Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Gilbert and George, Jeremy Deller, Grayson Perry, Anthony Gormley, Chris Ofili and Anish Kapoor.) In fact I was quite impressed by most of the work.

The one that seemed to me to have the most actual artistic merit was the exhibition by Mohammed Sami, who was born in Iraq and now lives and works in London. 'After the Storm' was originally exhibited at Blenheim Palace and I could quite imagine it in those opulent rooms. Built in the 18th century to reward the military triumphs of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, and later owned by the Churchill family, Blenheim is full of art related to wars and power. Sami's work seeks to challenge the triumphalism, creating paintings about memory and conflict that are metaphorical and ambiguous, fragmented and evocative. Spread across huge canvasses, I found they rewarded my attention; I found them lyrical and in many cases beautiful. The huge one above left, had sunflowers in it, ripped out and trampled, apparently, by horses' hooves, which I took (rightly or wrongly) to be a reference to Ukraine, whose national flower is a sunflower. 

The Guardian reviewer was a bit snooty about them (HERE) but my response was positive. It was perhaps a bit too 'safe' for the judges? 

Nnena Kalu's work is raw and chaotic, brightly coloured and visceral. She's learning-disabled, with limited verbal communication and works with Action Space to facilitate her work. She takes basic forms like tubes and wraps them up in scraps, tape, fabric, even discarded VHS tape. The hanging forms suggest bodies, animals, or pinatas, reminding me (perhaps bizarrely) of the fools and hobby horses that are traditionally associated with Morris dancing. Her wall paintings are huge scribbles and vortices of colour. You get the impression that she puts her whole body and being into her art. 

Most of the reviews I've read seem to rate these the highest but I had to wonder if they'd have thought that if they didn't know the artist was neurodivergent. Art and 'culture' these days seems to be very intent on examining (and championing) identity and diversity and I guess in today's society these are urgent issues to grapple with. 

Stress buster

I seem to be having an incredibly busy few weeks. It's all good things but I notice I'm feeling a bit more stressed than I usually do, having a lot going on in my head. (I don't know how I ever managed to work and be a mother and all that. Getting up and ready for the day now seems like 'work' and I can only really cope with one major event in a day! It doesn't really matter, given that I'm retired and can largely please myself as to how I spend my time. It just amazes me that I ever managed more.) 

Anyway, finding myself with a precious day free of other plans, the only thing to do was to seek out trees and water, always good for stress busting. So I took a walk along the River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey to enjoy the autumn colour, which is really developing now. 

The Blacksmith's Forge

Dobson Locks on the Leeds-Liverpool Canal at Apperley Bridge recently had a Heritage Open Day. I went along as I was interested to see the blacksmith's forge in use. (I had an ancestor who was a blacksmith.)

David Wadsworth, a Trust volunteer and former blacksmith, was demonstrating how the forge worked and the skills needed to work the metal. He was assisted by a 'bellow boy', Phil Bristow, whose job was to rhythmically work the leather and wood bellows contraption, which pumps air into the coals to increase the heat and flame. Metal rods are left in the fire for a while until glowing red, at which point they can be removed and worked. A lot of the skill seemed to be in judging the optimum point to remove the metal to work it. Left too long and it goes brittle and sends dangerous sparks, too short and it's not malleable enough to work. David explained the various tools he used as he made some some demo pieces. 

When it was a working forge, they made all sorts of items for the locks, some of them quite large. You may be able to see in the photo below that there is a square hatch at the back of the fire, and that enabled very long metal pieces to be threaded through and heated. They have been able to piece together the history of the forge since the early 1800s, from documents, receipts and census records. They know who the blacksmith was at various dates and, as so often in the past, it seems to have been quite a family affair, passing from father to son. 

David was making smaller and more decorative items like hooks and pokers. It was fascinating to watch.  

He was wearing traditional wooden soled boots, studded with nails - and incidentally told us that Silsden, further up the canal, at one time had many small forges specialising in nail-making. 

In a workshop further along the row, they were making wooden parts for locks. Of course, water eventually rots the wood of the gates and paddles. Traditionally made of oak, gates have a lifespan, apparently, of about thirty years. There is a large canal workshop at Stanley Ferry near Wakefield, one of only two in the UK that now has the skills and capacity to make the huge gates themselves.