One Thing Thursday

I'm back in Bury St Edmunds today with a rather odd Lloyds Bank sign I spotted. The green is right, but where's the familiar equine? This one with the beehive is its precursor and was the bank's symbol from the 1820s. A quick scrabble round dear old Goggle tells me that it symbolised thrift and industry and the black horse didn't come in until 1884. The bank used both of the symbols until the 1930s.

Arilx

One Thing Wednesday

 

This is one of the doors of the Tudor House Hotel in Tewkesbury. You can still see the gouges left by the Jacobite battleaxes following the coronation of George I in 1714. Sometimes buildings literally do record the scars of history.

Arilx

One Thing Tuesday

 

This rather folorn looking gentleman is known as "Melancholy Man" and is claimed to be London's saddest statue. He stands tucked away largely unnoticed in a niche in Holland Park and I only snapped him in passing as I was leaving. Nothing is known about him except that he's made from limestone and may date from the 16th century. For those who watch "Who do you think you are?" Holland Park was recently featured in the episode about Josh Widdicombe.

Arilx 

One Thing Monday

 Seeing as I've picked up my first cold in over two years I've been confined to barracks these past few days and all plans have had to be cancelled. Rather than scratch around this week for blog content I'm just going to make things easy for myself and show a single photo of something I've seen this year which I haven't shown on here before. Once I can get out gallivanting again normal nonsense will be resumed!

This is the Pillar of Salt in Bury St Edmunds. It is thought to be the first internally illuminated road sign and was designed by the architect Basil Oliver in 1935.  It definitely has an Art Deco look to it, but I'd plump for it looking more like a lighthouse if they'd asked me to name it! Nowadays it's a Grade II listed building.

Arilx

Slip up

This just amused me when I spotted it in London at the weekend....makes a pleasant change from the standard signage warning about slip hazards🍌 Have a lovely weekend.

Arilx

Lest We Forget

A personal remembrance made anonymously that has appeared in the town centre this week.

Arilx

 

Holy Moley [showing animal specimens]

I've pondered these past couple of days about how best to blog about the Grant Museum of Zoology that I popped into with Lovely Grey last Saturday. In the end I've just decided to dive in head first....if the subject matter is zoology then it's never going to be pretty things in those specimen jars is it! Robert Grant set the museum up in 1827 as a teaching/educational aid for UCL. Its establishment meant that the university was the first one in the country to teach evolution. 

I think three photos should suffice to give you an idea of what was in all those showcases. It's most known for this jar of moles....precisely why I can't fathom. The others are a fuzzy shot of a sample of 12000 year old mammoth hair and the skeleton of a large flying fox.

I'm sure that some people seeing these will loathe them, but I have always had a strange fascination with anything like this....at a young age I was taken to Walter Potter's Museum of Curiosities which was filled with scenes that Potter had set up using animals that he had taxidermied and then dressed  up https://www.amusingplanet.com/2011/12/walter-potter-museum-of-curiosities.html Although later on the museum closed and the collection was broken up, I can still remember it clearly. Likewise my science lessons were spent with a dissected rat in a piece of perspex propped on the end of our bench.  As with many things in life, I have reached the conclusion that we are a mass of contradictions when it comes to this sort of thing....many of us will happily visit stately homes  with animal heads mounted on walls or view stuffed birds behind glass without giving it a second thought. Perhaps it's just what we're accustomed to. However, I know that I'm not the only one judging by the number of other people there too!

No doubt Lovely Grey and I will manage to find something else out of the ordinary to see next time we meet!

Arilx