Gulliver’s Milton Keynes Club Site, Buckinghamshire

It is still only mid-afternoon as I write this, having returned to camp like mature people after a Sunday midday dinner and a bottle of wine, an unfamiliar state for us. But the focus of the day was to celebrate the anniversary of one of our many milestones, and so I should not beat myself up about not having done more, and the fact there are many attractions or wish-list places unchecked on our list.

We woke to another fine day, this the last day of the summer mid-term break, and it was not long before it was evident that more than half the campers would be gone by midday, something worth celebrating all by itself. It was also a morning to wake and find on one’s iPhone news updates that the world had tilted for some; there had been another terrorist attack in London, the third in as many months. I hung another load of washing on my diminutive line, watched the squirrels scurry hither and thither about the park immediately behind our caravan, listened and watched as the many different varieties of birds made themselves known, and thought how strange life is, that disaster can be occurring in one small corner of the world while in another, life goes on unscathed.

We delayed our departure, initially hoping to catch the last Sunday morning political commentary before the election, now just days away, and  then to catch up with English family, arriving just beyond the satellite suburb of Great Linford at 11am. We booked a table at The Black Horse located on the banks of the Grand Union Canal and set off northwards along the tow path, planning to walk for three quarters of an hour before turning back. This was not to account for the lengthy chats we had with canal dwellers along the route, so our morning constitutional was not as vigorous as planned.

Add caption

The first encounter started when we stepped over a small Toy Yorkshire Terrier on the pathway, which we subsequently learned to be blind. His owner poked his head out of a porthole and was quick to confirm his best mate’s pedigree, before stepping onto the pathway himself and filling us in on his recent personal history which included his mother’s death, the adoption of the dog and the wonders and eccentricities of this particular terrier. We also learned about the day to day housekeeping of maintaining a narrow-boat canal side, very little of it news to us as motorhomers and caravanners, but apparently a surprise to those who take up the narrowboat lifestyle with little research or thought. 

We continued along the tow path for about half an hour, not arriving at any particular waypoint to exactly identify the extent of our route, however later checking out a map, I reckoned we were just short of New Bradwell before we turned back.

As we passed the terrier’s owner, we remarked on the smashed window in the adjacent boat and asked if this had been an act of vandalism. “No”, he replied, the boat belonged to his mate who was sitting beside him enjoying a pre-lunch beer, and was the result of a relationship fracas. He continued, remarking that romance was alas always doomed, never to last and more likely to end in such a manner.

I responded, “Not so, because we, my husband and I, were today celebrating twenty three years of romance.”

In typical last-word fashion, he responded that murderers only got fifteen years!

Despite the gloom from such doubters, Chris and I enjoyed a fabulous midday dinner at the canal-side pub booked into earlier, served by an attentive waiter wearing shorts too tight for genital health, but no doubt he had chosen to dress like this to offer his credentials to his fellows rather than worry about discomfort or long term vascular well-being. This is in fact no different to heterosexual women who allow their ample breasts to spill from their too tight bodices and their bellies to ooze over the waist bands of pants; there is little subtlety to any of this fashion.

But aside from this visual excitement, the food was superb, and we could only recommend the pub restaurant to anyone passing this way, especially if they have a wallet full of virgin British pounds, “virgin” because they have recently been converted from Antipodean dollars. And keeping with this “tight” mentality, it is interesting to consider that when my parents shouted themselves a narrow-boat holiday in this part of the world about thirty years ago, they spoke of the marvellous pub lunches available, for just a few dollars. I know they would be very surprised to learn what we shelled out today, but then, the standard of cuisine is more in line with city restaurants these days, and the little country pubs now rely on the restaurant trade to meet their rent. Times have changed indeed.

So we are now back “home” parked up in front of the television; the washing all dried, folded and stowed away, Chris dozing in front of the French Open which has become his must-view over the past week, and thinking of our move north west tomorrow. We could easily have spent another week here in Milton Keynes and not had any down days, and had we bicycles on board, probably a week more. Today we agreed that Milton Keynes would be an excellent place to live, because what it lacks in “olde worlde” character, it offers in location, location, location and traffic free travel. In England that makes it very valuable in more ways than monetary!  

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.

Gulliver’s Milton Keynes Club Site, Buckinghamshire

This morning we left Milton Keynes heading into Bedfordshire with a short list of three or four attractions to visit;  one never knows how much of one’s time or interest is to be held by any one place. As it happened, English Heritage’s Wrest Park kept us occupied for most of the day or at least to the point we had little time and energy to do anything more, apart from calling into the superstore at Kingston on the way home for diesel and restocking the pantry and fridge.

Wrest Park is a country estate on the edge of Silsoe, a charming village which is most likely all part of the estate providing on-going income. The Grade I listed house, an extremely elegantly styled mansion and the surrounding gardens, similarly graded, make for a fabulous family day out. The half-term holiday is still here, hence the hundreds of children about today enjoying the expansive lawns and woods, just as we did.

The de Greys occupied  the Wrest Estate for over six hundred years and each generation left their mark. The family reached its greatest prominence when Edward IV made Edmund Grey his Lord Treasurer in 1463 and then Earl of Kent in 1465. More than two hundred years later the formal gardens and the canal known as the Long Water were created by Amabel Benn, together with her son, Anthony, the 11^th Earl and his wife Mary.

The existing house was built in the 1830s, designed by its owner, Thomas de Grey, 2^nd Earl de Grey, an amateur architect and the first president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who was inspired by buildings seen in Paris. At the time of construction, following the Napoleonic Wars, French design was not in vogue, but de Grey was not to be swayed by “fashion” and for that we can be thankful.

The grounds had been remodelled back in the second half of the 18^th century when Capability Brown’s services were engaged. Fortunately for all concerned, few of his plans were realised; the owners respected the legacy of their ancestor’s efforts.

Over the years there were money woes, and lead statues were melted down and new structures were erected using recycled bits and pieces, but finally after the property had been passed down through the generations, often sideways, to siblings, cousins or nephews and the aristocratic titles watered down, the last recipient, Nan Herbert, was responsible for setting up and running the hospital in the house during the first years of World War I.

But in 1917 the house was sold to a private buyer, after which it fell into  decline. From 1948 it was home to the National Institute of Agricultural Engineering, later the Silsoe Research Institute. When the institute closed in 2006, English Heritage took over the house, undertaking a twenty year project to restore the gardens to their pre-1917 state.

Much of the buildings on the property are occupied by light industry and commercial enterprise, bringing in a steady income for English Heritage. There is another income stream from offering the property as a wedding venue; last year there were thirty ceremonies and receptions held here, today there was yet another  which is why the State rooms were closed at 11am, and the Orangerie all day. Like all similar properties opened to the public, there is plenty going on to draw the public and I was led to believe today that this property manages to be self-supportive plus contribute to the running cost of others spread across the East of England. 

We arrived soon after opening time and were warned of the partial closures, so set off at once to the State Rooms, and were duly greatly impressed by the grandeur, even though they are unfurnished. The weather forecast also warned of heavy rain and thunderstorms early in the afternoon, so we then set off with audio guides on a tour of the ninety acres of garden.

After lunch we returned to the exhibition laid out in the open rooms in the ground floor of the house and then meandered through the rose and other more formal gardens. The rain was still to arrive; we had been lucky and set off back home before our luck changed.

Gulliver’s Milton Keynes Club Site, Buckinghamshire

Another fine day greeted us on this the first day of the meteorological summer.  Chris was intent on checking out two of the nearby cites, the first and most distant of these being Luton, that of international airport fame. So we set off just before 9am, travelling just over twenty miles south on the A5 and found our way into the city centre and a multi-story car park building.  

Our first introduction to the city after parking up was the frustration of finding our way out into The Market which was apparently just a short distance away within the same complex. We walked up and down the concrete stairs looking for an exit, soon joined by a middle aged local woman who agreed the whole business was quite complicated. With her help, we found our way out into the city street, and set off looking for the vibrancy of city life. The overwhelming first impression was one of drabness however it was still early and probably not the best time to be judging the life blood of a city.

We found our way to the library in St George’s Square and while the friendly chap behind the counter was unable to offer any map, he did suggest we set off on foot "just five minutes up the road" to Wardown Park and the museum. It took us nearer half an hour, although we did do the return to town minutes less, but were glad we made the effort because it did seem that this was about as much as Luton could offer the tourist on "a day out in Luton".

The Park is situated on the River Lea, well upriver from Hertford where we had become well acquainted with this stretch of water. Here it is not much more than a drain, especially as it flows away from the park and down through the city’s plumbing. The lake which hosts the regular crowd of water birds and a fair bit of rubbish, was formed by the widening of the River Lea during the development of the park in the Victorian era. The Park provides a green expanse for the sari clad and headscarf wearing brigade out and about this morning and is also home to the Luton Museum and Art Gallery.

The area was once a farmhouse and country residence, the latter taken over and rebuilt by a local solicitor named Frank Scargill in the late 1870s. He retained the name of the original farmhouse, “Bramingham Stott”and resided here with his family until 1893. The house was then let until it was purchased by the Borough Council in 1904.

During the First World War, the house was used as a military hospital, then after a variety of other lives, it became home to the museum in 1930. It’s a great little museum and the house itself is a fine spacious building which one would feel quite comfortable living in even today.

I was particularly interested to learn about the genesis of Luton, or at least it’s more recent history. Right through to the 19^th century, Luton was just a small market town, well known for the making of straw hats from the 1600s, but by 1900 it had undergone substantial growth, much of that related to the hat industry. What had been very much a cottage industry, the work mainly carried out by women and children, grew to industrial proportions when big London hat makers set up branches in the town, wanting to be nearer the source of their raw material: straw plait. There was plenty of cheap land for sale in the town at the time, building development was not controlled, two railway lines provided good transport links, electricity was cheap from the town council’s own power station and the lack of trade unions kept labour costs down so enterprising people set up small workshops and factories, changing Luton into the centre of the women’s hat trade.

It was those same excellent conditions for enterprise that encouraged the transfer of other new industry coming to town between 1895 and 1910, most of them engineering companies; names like Vauxhall, Skefko, Haywood Tyler, Kent’s, Electrolux, Commer Cars, Jacksons – all became synonymous with Luton. 

Many parts of the country suffered during the depression of the 1920s and 1930s but Luton’s new firms expanded. Secure jobs, good pay and homes attracted people from different areas, many coming from the depressed regions although the majority came from London and the south east. From the 1940s onwards, workers arrived from Ireland, the Caribbean, South Asia and many other parts of the world. Luton’s workforce proved to be flexible and adaptable; the skills learned in one manufacturing industry were often put to good use in another. By the end of the 20^th century manufacturing industries had declined and been replaced by service industries and so many people who live in Luton today now commute to work elsewhere, a story repeated all over the country.

These days the population of Luton and the immediate area is up around a quarter of a million, about half of it white and the rest a mixture of races who have long called themselves citizens of the United Kingdom. Our impressions were of a working class bunch, a fact supported by comments and observations made during a political broadcast during the last week.

We returned to the car soon after midday and found our way west to Dunstable which is altogether a more pleasant looking town. We were looking for the Dunstable Downs, parklands found in our National Trust directory, and found the swathe of ridgelands a little to the south of the town. We were not the first there; I suspect that most there were not members but had parked up and fed the parking machine. For us with our membership sticker on the windscreen, parking was free. We took our eski over to a bench and dined with expansive views of the countryside laid out below us. Immediately below us was the London Gliding Club,  and to the south and north, folk could be seen walking into the distance. We watched the gliders land and then take off again towed behind the small plane, then circle high above us seeking the thermals, we watched dozens of families flying kites and a couple of paragliders swoop around the low chalk cliffs to the north. 

The Dunstable Downs are a chalk escarpment in the north-east reaches of the Chiltern Hills, and are crossed by a network of walking tracks, not least the Ridgeway, an old road walked for 5,000 years or more. The Ridgeway Link is the walk we came upon when we visited the White Horse two years ago, a walk stretching 140 kilometres and certainly not for us today, although we did enjoy the hour or so we spent walking through the fields and woods after our lunch.