fnarf999

Yes, that was me. That hotel room also featured shag carpeting in the bathroom, with a shower curtain several inches too short and too narrow, and a light switch that (a) controlled the TV and (b) was clear across the room from the bed, making it impossible to watch TV with the light off (the sparking, full-of-water light I might add), and making it impossible to watch TV in bed without getting up to turn it off.

And the place was chock-a-block with drunken football supporters (Everton-Liverpool derby day), crashing around the hallways until four AM, and there were gunshots out the window.

Not the loveliest experience we've ever had, but it was all made worthwhile by watching the footie fans at breakfast the next morning, red and sweating with hangover, trying unsuccessfully to choke down their dry toast and tea.

I guess we're good-humored! This trip featured nothing like that, though there were plenty of adventures in Liverpool, as we shall see.

sashh

flanneruk

No there are other differences


in the south they LEAVE THE SkIN ON THE FISH *shudder* and the cooking fat varies a lot.

With my trans Pennine upbringing I appreciate fish and chips from Yorkshire, cooked in dripping with bits on and Lancashire chips and gravy.

fnarf999

Don't worry about the food Nazi's - beef dripping is a natural product and fries at a much higher temperature than oil so although it has a higher fat content the fish and chips are cooked quicker so less is absorbed. Also no nasty trans fats

really enjoying your trip report

audere_est_facere

in the south they LEAVE THE SkIN ON THE FISH *shudder* >>>>

Of course we do - it's the best bit. I didn't realise that the northern monkeys took it off.

flanneruk

I don't think skin is a north/south thing

I'm sure I've very rarely had haddock or cod, in any British chip shop, with the skin on. Look at a cod, and you'll see why. They're huge buggers (think of the label on Scott's Emulsion bottles if your memory goes back that far) and few portion-size chunks are anywhere near the skin. You DO get skin on the unbattered cod served roast in trendy places - including those in the north - but it's rarely the best bit. Tough and not very tasty.

I've also rarely had plaice in a chippy without skin - north or south. Plaice was almost unheard of in the northern chippies I got my Friday treat from as a kid - and it's still not in any of them these days. But in poncey sit down places, anywhere, my memory is that battered plaice always keeps the skin. And that IS the best bit.

audere_est_facere

Do you get rock eel/rock salmon/huss/dogfish or whatever you want to call it up north?

fnarf999

Sashh, the reason I have to worry about the food Nazis is because if I go out they are preparing, or at least vetting, my food! I would leap at the chance to eat fish cooked in drippings, but around here, the majority of potential customers, or just passersby with an excess interest in the habits of their neighbors, would be going "EEEWWW" and reporting the place to the authorities. For all I know, it's illegal; it certainly wouldn't surprise me.

I've never had the plaice, and that appears to have been a mistake. Someday. My favorite fish around here is the local wild salmon -- a different (and superior!) genus to the Atlantic variety you get back east and in Europe, oncorynchus instead of salmo -- and it is definitely best with the skin on, especially if that skin has been grilled crispy in places. It would probably be horrible battered and fried, though.

tod

fnarf - I'm loving your report because it brings back so many wonderful memories for me, especially your take on Blackpool.
We were taken there by friends who live just outside Manchester (Stockport) during September so that we could experience The Illuminations.
I loved those old trams! All the windows steamed up because it was constantly drizzling with rain which was a pity.
I was hoping you would tell us what you thought of the famous Blackpool Tower Ballroom (see that you gave the Tower a miss because of cost) but the Ballroom is free and what a superb place! The enormous Wurlitzer organ plays from 10am for the Tea-dancing which we watched from the chairs and tables on the sides. They also have live Big Band music in the evenings but we never got to see that.
The interior is really over-the-top with balconies and gilded ornate ceilings and other details. I thought it fabulous! So sorry if you missed it - now you will have to go back someday?

fnarf999

York.

We said goodbye to Blackpool North Station, a charming edifice described by Stuart Maconie as looking "less like a railway station than a decontamination plant" or like "a disused naval base in the Bering Straits", in the usual way: queuing with drunks.

The shaven-headed boy in line ahead of me at the newsagents, where I was buying my usual armload of newspapers and he was buying two more cans of Carling Super to supplement the two that were bulging out of his trackie pockets and the two that were already inside his belly (at ten AM), turned to me and asked "nyaaah girt burn aragh tomma chimma daht nyahh wyet geh lee gah an? (hic)" Sorry? I have to say, Liverpudlian is a piece of cake, Mancunian is rough but understandable, Yorkshire is easy, just really really broad, but Lancashire is completely unintelligible to me. I had him repeat it three times and finally had to beg off with "I'm sorry, I'm an American, I don't understand". He finally just pointed at the line and said "the train". I don't know if that meant "that's a train over there" or "what time does it leave?" or "if you get on that train I'm going to disembowel you and fry your gizzards in a pan" or "doesn't that queue seem awfully long for a Sunday, old bean?" "Yes" I replied.

The woman at the counter was just as difficult to understand, but I did make out both a "love" and a "pet", and the amount I owed was displayed on a screen, so I knew I could handle the situation.

One of my newspapers was the heretofore unseen "Non League Football", which I was very excited to read, but somehow lost in the cramped quarters on board and never saw again. It's a shame, because I was getting tired of reading about Chelsea and Manchester United every day and looking forward to some news from Bedlington Terriers and Shepshed Dynamo for a change. Not to be.

The train was packed to the windows. My wife and I both got a seat, but far from each other, and the entire length of the aisle was packed full. Two carriages home from a holiday site on a summer Sunday? Oh dear. I was on the window, and miraculously didn't have to get up to pee once on the way to York.

Out the window of a train was Lancashire: the mostly hidden flats of the Fylde, followed by backdoor views of Preston and Blackburn. The excitement built within me as we approached the Pennines; if you want an idea of just how sad and dweeby an anorak I am, I was hugely sorry I could not stop and take in the majesty of the Preston Bus Station, a concrete neo-brutalist landmark from 1969 threatened with demolition. Blackburn is lovelier, with glimpses of some fine mills and terraces. I did not see any of the famous holes. Someday I hope to return and make this journey more slowly, along the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.

After Blackburn the charming town of Accrington, and more fine industrial glimpses, the landscape is changing. Burney is our last stop in Lancashire, and Hebden Bridge our first in Yorkshire. The stone-walled fields climbing up the convoluted hills of the Pennines are beautiful. Really, whipping through this country on a train is unfair to it, but we've booked a city trip this time. Unfortunately Leeds did not make the final cut, and the brief flashes we catch from the train window tell us nothing about this great city. We will return, hopefully by the time Leeds United return to the Premiership!

York Station is one of the prettiest in the world. When it was built in 1877 it was the world's largest, somewhat out of proportion to the importance of York as a city these days. From the outside, it's nice enough, somewhat confusing, and rather typical station architecture; but inside, on the platform where you arrive, you see one of the most remarkable curved platform train sheds in the world. This building is not <i>like</i> a cathedral; it <i>is</i> a cathedral of industrial might and the majesty of motive power.

York is very different than Blackpool, that's for sure! Our cabbie clued us in, with his wrinkled-nose incomprehension at our having come from there. You could see the difference immediately: no garbage in the streets! No boarded-up buildings! No half-naked drunks falling into the road! Just neat streets and well-kept, reserved Georgian fronts.

Our hotel was in the Bootham area, a mixed Georgian and Victorian area just north of Bootham Bar. Our hotel was lovely, and our room was enormous, and featured the longest bathtub I have ever seen -- a six-footer could lie at full length. I'm a hand short of six feet, so I was able to indulge my second-favorite pastime (after wine-drinking; OK, make that third-favorite), and soak with both my head and my knees submerged simultaneously for once. The hotel was called Alhambra Court, on a quiet cul-de-sac leading into the Museum Gardens, and I recommend it not only for the location and the rooms but for the utterly delightful Yorkshire brogue of the woman on the desk. I'm no connoisseur, so I can't tell you exactly which square foot of which Riding she was from, but to an American those long, long a's and e's sound like they're never going to end. I wanted to hand her a book and have her read me a few chapters, just for the sound of it, but my wife saved me the embarrassment and dragged me up the slowest elevator in the world.

I don't have a lot to say about York itself. It's very old. It's very beautiful. If you want details on which ancient half-timbered buildings are how old, exactly, or what ghosts supposedly live on in which pubs (actually, all talk of ghosts makes my blood boil and fists clench, but it's all in good cheesy commercial fun, then, isn't it?) It's a fascinating place, but not what this report is about.

We did spend five hours in the National Railway Museum, my suffering wife's greatest indulgence. Even she was impressed with the open warehouse facility, where the Museum has opened up some of its vast storehouse of items, from the spectacular to the mundane, for somewhat chaotic viewing. Old station doorknobs, railway signs from every company and every station, marble busts of Huskisson and Brunel, thousands and thousands of models in every scale imaginable, including some unique to that individual modeler; the conference table of the Great Western Railway next to a 1980s cash register and a 1940s ticket printer; hundreds of doors, light fixtures, signal bars, brass steam levers, sections of rail; models of proposed new stations built and unbuilt; racks and racks of paintings and prints; drawers full of 170 years' worth of ticket stubs, pamphlets, conductors' cap badges, keys; really anything you can imagine and more, all tagged and racked and cataloged in binders you can paw through.

In the Great Hall, where the working turntable is still used to move the collection, are the locomotives. There are two replicas of the Rocket, which won the Rainhill Trials for George Stephenson, on his Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world's first, and there's a Shinkansen bullet train you can walk through and sit on the seats of. There's Mallard, the streamlined beauty Pacific class express engine that set the still-standing steam speed record of 126 mph, set in 1938 (though probably surpassed many times, illegally, by American trains who wished to avoid the publicity of a record).

There's at least a hundred other locomotives on the premises, mostly steam, including the Flying Scotsman, a work in progress in the restoration shed. Seeing the workshop with its tools and locomotive parts spread out is almost more interesting than the restored machines in the Great Hall, as this is where the continuing tradition of steam engineering is kept alive.

There's a ton of other good stuff to see at the museum, including some working stationary engines. Sadly these are not working in steam, but are powered &quot;backwards&quot; from electric rollers turning their great flywheels and working the pistons. We didn't get to see anything actually in steam. Fifteen years ago I watched the great Watt engine in the Kew Bridge Steam Museum in London; nothing that exciting happened here. But I have no complaints. Five hours could very easily have been fifteen, or five hundred. I think it's better than the Louvre, or the British Museum, or the Met.

But then, I would.

We also visited York Minster, one of the the great cathedrals of Europe, easily in a class with Chartres or Notre Dame or Canterbury. It was built primarily in the 13th through the 16th centuries, in Early English, Perpendicular Gothic, and Decorated Gothic style. The best features are the many gorgeous windows, nearly as impressive a display of stained glass as Ste. Chappelle in Paris. The East Window is the largest medieval window in the world, but for me the real glory is the &quot;Heart of Yorkshire&quot;, the 14th-century Great West Window with its delicate stone tracery around the upper part of the glass. It was fascinating to see the restoration work in progress, with several of the original window sections in glass cases at ground level so you could see the construction, the painting, leading, and restoration work, itself quite old in places. There's some technical reason the green pieces have largely been replaced that I didn't get; my copy of the Minster guidebook is in a box somewhere in the North Atlantic, alas.

As always, I found the evidences of the Minster as a living church as interesting as the old historical junk. I am not a believer, but I'm fascinated by memorials from the two World Wars and more recent decorative works, and the way this ancient building is still used by regular families with their names on the pews. The Minster is not a relic; it is a modern building too.

In the undercroft there's loads of old silver we barely glanced at and some fascinating Roman and Norman building remains. Every foot of this ground not only has a past but three or four pasts, and the multiple buildings that have stood on this site were all oriented differently and used for different purposes. There has been an important church here for almost 1400 years, though, and bits of stone from hundreds of years before that are visible.

In the central city I bought some books and some silly animal figurines made of Yorkshire coal, the sad last remnants of that once-great industry which powered the industrial might of Britain and blackened her walls and lungs. Now the blackened lungs are all in China, and the last British coal is carved into badgers.

We ate a surprisingly excellent meal in 50s throwback and tourist magnet Betty's Cafe Tea Rooms, behind a beautiful round picture window in the heart of St. Helens Square. A lot of English people have seemingly forgotten how to make a decent cup of tea, but not in Betty's. The food here is, uh, &quot;Yorkshire-Swiss&quot;, and my r&ouml;sti was outstanding. I was not expecting much, but I got it. Their chocolate, at least the 70% single-estate bar, is, according to the very picky expert I married, ace as well.

The gardens, the walls, the narrow streets, the shops, the cobblestones, the half-timbering: it's all good. It made for an extreme contrast with Blackpool, in almost every way imaginable; York has no neon, no animatronic amusements, no strip clubs with barkers outside, no rides, no garbage or distasteful displays of any kind. well, we didn't go in the Yorvik Centre; maybe all that stuff is in there.

By this time in our trip my feet were starting to bark pretty severely, but fortunately York has lots and lots of great pubs, where one can enjoy more of the spectacular Yorkshire drawl. Really, this makes Texans and Mississippians sound tight and clipped in comparison! We watched Liverpool stumble again to a lucky draw against Porto in the rather uncharismatic but very friendly Bootham Tavern just outside the Bar.

And the beer was excellent. &quot;Get yourself a mate called Smith&quot;, they used to say, and I recommend that you do -- John (the one with the slogan) is great, Samuel's even better. Both have been brewed for centuries in Tadcaster, about halfway between Leeds and York. Partisans of American craft ales will disagree, but I don't think there's any American microbrew that comes within a mile of even middling English cask ale, and Yorkshire ales are among the very best.

The nice thing about Samuel Smiths is that all of their tied houses are music-free, which means no Amy Winehouse groaning at top volume out of the jukebox. Maybe there's a TV, but mostly you just hear yourself and your neighbors talking. Which is the way it should be. No other British institution is more desperately needed in America than the real public house, not as a place to get wasted in and vomit outside the door of, but as a quiet neighborhood place to enjoy a glass or two, some conversation, and a sit. We have fake varieties here, but the beer is terrible and the jukebox loud and smelly dogs are peeing on your shoe and fraternity boys are shouting and punching each other on the arm -- not the same thing at all. You don't see nice looking older people sitting and reading the paper of an evening in Seattle bars; bars here are exclusively for the young or the chronically alcoholic.

My favorite pubs are in Liverpool, as we shall see, but you could do worse than to spend an evening in the York Arms, a Samuel Smith house, with tiny rooms, comfortable furniture, and fantastic, cheap beer -- the bitter was I think &pound;1.30, the cheapest I saw on our trip. They don't do mild much in Yorkshire, I guess, but I'll settle for this stuff any day.

Next: Scarborough

sashh

I can hardly wait for the Scarborough report.

You are talking about so many places I have either lived or visited (every school trip in my childhood seemed to be York) Your OH seems to have missed out in York, have you not heard the names Terry's and Rowntree?

audere_est_facere

It's just not right to have battered fish with skin on, and a proper Yorkshire chippy sells haddock and chips,nothing else (maybe a little cod)

flanneruk

I've never had chip shop fish with the skin on in the north, in fact I never had fish with the skin on until I moved south. Three years in Oxford with skin on fish and then another three in London with the same.

Sorry fnarf999 - didn't mean to hijack your thread and turn it into the great chippy debate - although I'm now considering moving to the US and opening a pub / tearooms / chip shop.

audere_est_facere

It's just not right to have battered fish with skin on, and a proper Yorkshire chippy sells haddock and chips,nothing else (maybe a little cod)&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;

It's grim up north.

Chris_England

Keep this coming.

Your sarcasm muscles seem to be toning up nicely !

Glad you liked Blackpool. Can't understand people who go to Blackpool because they've heard it's fun in a spectacularly trashy way, then complain how trashy it is. I think most of them are just going because it's in the book by a well-known US guide writer and TV presenter, and they feel they have to tick it off even though it's not to their taste.

Long live tack ! I always come back from Blackpool wondering where my money went, but NOT feeling ripped off. It's almost a pleasure to be somewhere in England that is good at taking money off you, rather than so many places who don't seem to care whether they get your business or not

I bet that Mr Fnar, being from the US, will agree how annoying it is when shops close by the the clock while full of customers, or have quite random opening times, or run out of things &quot;because they are very popular&quot; (wouldn't it make better business sense to run out of the things that AREN'T very popular).

Hungry for the next installment.

flanneruk

I'm sure fnarf isn't too upset to find his (outstanding, by the way) accounts of Real Britain interrupted by the Great Skin Dispute.

But sashh really is confused about one thing. I probably eat more chippy fish in Oxford than any other poster on this site (and have been, on and off, for forty years now) - and either I've never knowingly encountered skin, except for the occasional plaice, or the Alzheimer's is hitting a great deal sooner than I'd planned.

Ditto London (whose use of dogfish or whatever is a peculiar local horror).

I'm obviously going to have to do a serious survey of London and Oxford chippies to establish whether it's me or sashh that's delusional. If the heart can take it, I'll report back.

fnarf999

That's a report I look forward to!

Chris, you are right on one thing: shops shutting at the dot of five-thirty, with a dozen people inside and six more headed their way with a fistful of ten pound notes, is extremely perplexing. And annoying. As is the experience, on a balmy summer's evening, of standing in a major shopping precinct in broad daylight still, and seeing nothing but metal shutters where the shops you were hoping to spend money in were just moments before.

Ah, well, at least the pubs are open.

Cimbrone

I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than be on this trip. That must be why it's probably my FAVORITE trip report ever! Can't wait for more

travel2live

A very interesting report. &quot;Grim&quot; would be the last word to describe northern England - I love it and cannot get enough of it. However, when I say north I mean Northumberland and Cumbria and the Borders - not a huge fan of Blackpool, Scarborough or Liverpool but am smitten with York.

Your descriptions are a joy to read - look forward to more.

fnarf999

Of interest to the discussion of where the North begins, the geographic center of England is a farm not far north of Nuneaton (Lindley Hall Farm, near Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire).

The geographic center of the island of Great Britain is Brennand Farm, near Dunsop Bridge, Lancashire, or Calderstones Hospital, near Whalley, Lancashire, if you exclude the islands.

So says http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_...United_Kingdom, anyways.

caroline_edinburgh

The North wouldn't start halfway up England, though, because you have to factor in the Midlands. Wonder where 2/3 up is ?

BTW it's all Down South from here.

sashh

North is relative

For Londoners it begins at Watford

flanneruk

'For Londoners the North begins at Watford'

Only for the oikiest and most socially isolated Londoners. The three postcodes nominated by last month's Tatler as Britain's poshest and most desirable - GL7 (Faringdon), GL56 (Daylesford) and OX7 (Charlbury) - are all north of Watford.

PatrickLondon

&lt;rapidly notes how best to avoid Tatler-readers&gt;