And now today's topic - Four great reasons to move to England.
This country still has the power to surprise me and make me smile. On my walk home the other day, I happened across a notice on the brick wall of a vaulted railway overpass next to the Thames (pictured). The sign said, in essence, that busking (performing live music for money without a valid licence) is prohibited. But it said it in such a quintessentially English way that I laughed out loud.
I then continued my walk. Hopton’s Almshouse, pictured in winter (I nicked this off the internet), is one of hundreds if not thousands of almshouses or ‘hospitals’ established in England from the Middle Ages onwards. This one, located in the heart of London near the Thames, was established in the eighteenth century. It is a horse shoe shaped estate of low buildings and gardens, dwarfed by the surrounding by large office buildings, such as IBM (across the street). Almshouses or hospitals were established as charities, usually to house the poor who could no longer work (at a time when there was no such thing as retirement). I can recommend a brilliant novel about one of these.
The next wonder I came across was the inscription over the door to the Kirkaldy’s Testing and Experimenting Works: “Fact Not Opinion”, a testament to the empiricism which underpinned the Industrial Revolution. From publicly available information, I learned that Kirkaldy’s works primarily involved the use of a giant machine 'which could test materials by putting the materials "under various stresses, namely, Pulling, Thrusting, Bending, Twisting, Shearing, Punching and Bulging"'. It was built in 1864-65 by Greenwood & Batley of Leeds, and measures 47 ft long and weighs almost 116 tons. The machine's hydraulic ram can produce a maximum force of 1 million lbs. "Kirkaldy's works attained a world-wide reputation in materials testing. Among its achievements, the machine performed tests for Blackfriars Bridge, which opened in 1869, the St. Louis Bridge over the Mississippi (built 1867-74), Hammersmith Suspension Bridge (opened 1887), Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the cables used to suspend the Skylon at the Festival of Britain in 1951. It was also used in accident investigations, including the 1879 Tay Bridge disaster and aircraft crashes."
Finally, just down the street from Kirkaldy’s works, I came upon a new Marks & Spencer Simply Food, which had just opened last week. I went in to have a look around and ended up spending way too much money on things I don’t need, like vanilla pods. Ben and Jaime, you will come to realise just how nice M&S is (and Waitrose, too).
