Delft Itself

A night on the tiles!

We've both visited The Netherlands many times for business reasons and for holidays but somehow we've missed out on Delft. It's a pretty little town with an old compact centre ringed by canals - in fact it's a bit like a mini Amsterdam. We stayed in a garret for three nights, well it was quite a roomy garret up three very steep flights of stairs overlooking a canal. It did the trick for us being a short walk from the train station, a short walk into the town centre and a slightly longer walk to the parkrun, our first in The Netherlands. Parkrun hasn't quite taken off yet over here but here there were around 60 runners and walkers trundling round a lovely green park,

Early morning stroll - don't fall in the canal!

 Heading to the left of our front door  and over the road took me along a quiet  canal side walk towards the Oud Kerk.  The Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church -  getting on for 400 feet of height in the  town square) is old enough and dates  from 1398 but the old one beats that by  a fair way. At that time most of the  tallest structures in Europe consisted of  church towers in what are now Belgium  and the Netherlands, the burghers of  Delft were keen that their church should  be on the list but when the tower was  over half way built it started to lean at  an angle, apparently they'd built on top  of an old in-filled canal. Undeterred they  built the remaining bit vertically and it's  stayed up ever since - but you can see  there's a kink in it. My photo shows it  leaning a little to the right. Just to pre-  empt any question about the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Oud Kerk tower is about 50 feet higher. We went a bit gung ho on churches in Delft and also visited the ancient St Hippolytus chapel for a mass (in Dutch) and the larger and rather magnificent Catholic church of St Maria Jessekerk, which together with the Oud and Nieuwe churches is also in the top ten tall churches in South Holland.

Magnificent Stockport (and elsewhere)

 

A whirl on the Wurlitzer anyone?

No reason why we shouldn't go back in time for a bit of nostalgia. In my previous tale of music engines in Treaddur Bay and beyond, I mentioned the famous Wurlitzer company, manufacturer of grand theatre organs. Since I wrote that post I recalled that Stockport Town Hall contains a fine example of the species which we saw a couple of times on our visits to the Stockport Beer Festival in the 1990's. The Paramount organisation had installed Wurlitzers in most of their US theatres and the plan was to do the same in Britain. Only one theatre in the UK was equipped with a Wurlitzer this being the Paramount Theatre (later it became the Odeon) on Oxford Street in Manchester. This particular machine has ended up in Stockport at the  Town Hall.

Stockport Town Hall - on a sunny day!

 And what a  fine town hall it  is, so  many times  we've  walked past and  never really paid much  attention to this grand  public building. Many  posher towns  than  Stockport would  be  very happy to  possess  this fine  civic building.  And Sir John Betjeman  was quoted  as saying  it's rather magnificent,  so there!

Back to the present, August saw us doing a bit of tourism, firstly to Central England again, this time to Stafford and Derby. Neither of these are on the tourist trail but they both have their pluses, Stafford has a pleasant old town centre with a large market place (currently being tarted up a bit) and Derby has several good looking churches including the cathedral which has a pair of resident breeding Peregrine Falcons living in it's tower! A stone's throw away is St Mary's Catholic church which was designed by Augustin Pugin in the nineteenth century - here's Vicky walking across the St Alkmund's Footbridge towards it. This bridge spans the city inner ring road and is the site of St Alkmund's church demolished in the 1960's by the city planners to make way for the traffic. The industrial history of both Derby and Stafford was shaped by the railways and we ran a very straight parkrun on an old reclaimed railway line near the centre of Stafford.

They turned the tap on today!

 A couple of weeks later we took the  short flight to Belfast and ticked off  another Northern Ireland parkrun.  Waterworks parkrun was the first in the  whole of Ireland and goes twice a  couple of reservoirs near  the centre of the city; this is Belfast's principal water  supply and the lower reservoir looked  distinctly muddy! The morning was  appropriately wet and not long after the  start of the run we all got suitably  drenched! However the weather  miraculously cleared up the following  day and we enjoyed a pleasant ramble  round Hillsborough Castle gardens with  our grandsons, not really a castle more  a stately home this is the residence of  King Charles when he visits Northern  Ireland. Following our potter round  several hungry mouths were assuaged  with pizza at the Parson's Nose!

He knows you know!