Gulliver’s Milton Keynes Club Site, Buckinghamshire

I mentioned a couple of days ago that Chris was keen to check out a couple of the nearby cities and so today we explored the second, Bedford. For him, Bedford, like Northampton further to the north-west, had simply been way-stations between East Anglia and Birmingham where his grandparents lived, names of towns passed through as a youth or younger.

Today Bedford is a city of a population of about 170,000 and is a vibrant city indeed, far more so than we found Luton to be. We drove across to the city this morning, a distance just short of twenty miles and parked up in the Park and Ride. Perhaps it was because we were able to relax as we entered the city proper rather than stressing about the whereabouts of a car park and finding our way to the centre, as we had driving into the centre of Luton, that gave us such a different experience. Or perhaps it is simply that Luton is a tired grey place and Bedford has more to offer.

We wandered through the main streets of the city, down to the River Great Ouse and crossed on a foot bridge then back again on a road bridge before following the banks along to the site of the old castle. The river was busy with swans and training rowers, and the banks with the populace who had weekend hours to fill. The streets were buzzing with those who had come in to shop in the market, and those who had come in to enjoy the festivities that were filling the pedestrianized and temporarily closed off streets. Too early for the museum, we settled into the Scottish Restaurant with a tray of coffee and chicken burgers, to tide us over for what looked like becoming a late lunchtime.

When the museum did eventually open, we were kept entertained for several hours, before finally emerging and consuming our sandwiches as if morning tea had not been taken. 

My to-do list had the Bedford Museum listed separately to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery and Bedford Gallery, but this had been gleaned from our very old guide book of British towns. These days the Higgins Bedford unites the three and is curated in a concise and modern fashion. The buildings in which this is all housed date back two hundred years and have their own history of occupation and use.

It was here that the Higgins family founded the brewery at Castle Lane, in the 1840s building the family home right next to it. The business was very successful and the family influential within the local community for over a hundred years. The brewery remained in the Higgins family until the late 1920s when Cecil Higgins, then over seventy and without issue, decided to sell to Wells & Winch in order to focus on his ambition to found a museum.

The extra special exhibitions are about Edward Bawden, a printmaker, water colourist, illustrator, designer and former Official War Artist who left the contents of his studio to Bedford, a collection of Victorian art titled “Romance and Rebellion” which I enjoyed very much and the third which I found fascinating, that titled “Blue-Sky Thinking: the Shorts Brothers’ Airships” celebrating the centenary of airships built here in Bedfordshire.  The first airships were built at the Cardington sheds in 1917 and the employees housed in a purpose built residential village named “Shortstown”. What particularly fascinated me was the fact that they are still being built today!

There was also an exhibition about William Burges, reputedly one of the most brilliant and imaginative architects of the 19^th century. Certainly he was imaginative, however much of what he created was off-the-wall and very little actually was realised. He filled his buildings with richly decorated interiors, painted furniture, metalwork, ceramics and stained glass, all with his unique and fantastical take on medieval style. It was he who was commissioned to create the bizarre rooms in the Cardiff Castle we saw last year, the work of an absolutely eccentric and mad genius. 

I enjoyed the section that covered the history of Bedford itself, one of the first snippets about the import of over 7,500 Italians to work in the brick factories in the 1950s. Today there are 15,000 descendants of those folk still living in Bedford, which explained the large proportion of older passengers on the bus who were greeting each other in formal Italian this morning.  Immigrants from South Asia, the West Indies, Africa and elsewhere poured into Bedford, indeed all parts of England to fill the labour gaps. Today there are over one hundred different languages spoken in Bedford.

Of course there was heaps more I found interesting:  Bedfordshire has been famous for its lacemaking for hundreds of years, introduced in the 16^th century by Flemish and Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution on the continent. Bedford’s Britannia Ironworks was one of the first foundries in the country to make steam driven ploughing engines, which were sold across the world. It was this Victorian engineering heritage that helped the town to develop into a major manufacturing centre in the period before and after the Second World War. 

Bedford made everything from sweets, crayons and light bulbs to electrical control gear, cast iron fittings and locomotives. Established firms and the brickworks continued to flourish and this manufacturing success encouraged even more international immigrants, making it one of the most ethnically diverse towns in the country. From the 1970s the towns manufacturing base declined, a story repeated nationwide, in fact right throughout the western world. New technology companies also set up in and around the town, which became home to the United Kingdom’s first semiconductor plant and a major centre of aircraft research and development. Today, world leading scientific research is carried out at Cranfield University and Colworth Park.

Out on the castle mound we learned the history of the structure that had one stood here;  this was yet another of those castles that sprang up immediately after the Norman invasion and was the site of an eight week long seige in 1224. After the surrender of the castle, its destruction was ordered by Henry III, however it was partially refortified in the 17^th century during the English Civil War. Today there is little left but it does make for a fine viewing spot over the river esplanade.

Down on the esplanade below this site, we found a large board explaining a plan to build a canal link between the River Great Ouse here in Bedford through to the Grand Union Canal in Milton Keynes. Currently this can only be navigated via a long winded detour of at least ten days from inland canals via the Northampton arm of the Grand Union Canal, to the River Nene and finally on to the Bedford Levels and the Fenland river system. The planned link will reduce this to a twenty six  kilometre stretch, a leisurely couple of day’s cruising, also facilitating the construction of pathways and green space for walkers, cyclists, fishers, horse riders and sight seers.

The route was the brain child of  one Samuel Whitbread, MP for Bedford about two hundred years ago. Other matters took precedence and it was put on the backburner until another radical thinker and Bedford resident named Brian Young revived the plan in 1994. Unfortunately these things take time and it is progressing but in minute steps and it may well be another two centuries before it is realised.  The riverside board suggested it might require some sort of lift like that at Falmouth or another up in Cheshire; a future attraction for future tourists.

We did not board the return bus until well into the afternoon, abandoning any other plans to call at parks and grand houses on our route back to Milton Keynes. Bedford had proved to be a most satisfactory destination all by itself.