History!

2007-02-18, 9:10 p.m.
The Historical Photo Entry
(speshly for Nicki)

Once upon a time there was a town. It was quite a nice town as it was kind of by the seaside, although Im not sure there was ever much of a beach. Ships came and went from all over the known world. Some of the ships were quite famous.

One of the famous ones was named after the extremely famous Mayflower Park, which has an ice cream van, some swings and a little stone shelter where Stepfie got a snog off one of the local cycle speedway stars when she was about 13 you can look out to sea and see the Isle of Wight�although why one would want to do that except for the purposes of thumbing ones nose at the Beetle Browed, Hedgehog Eating, Inbred Neanderthal inhabitants thereof, I cannot begin to suppose.

Anyway, as this was quite a nice little town, lots of people came to visit. Most of them were French and they tended to swarm about like they owned the place, naming streets after themselves and making the place smell of cheese and garlic. The good people of the town weren�t very keen on the French pitching up whenever they felt like it, shrugging and smoking cigarettes make from horsey-merde and waggling their eyebrows at the women and making them go all silly, so they built some walls around the outside of the town to keep the bastards out reinforce their immigration policies.

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As you can see, I couldn�t work out how to crop the picture so that I wouldn�t have all the tourist information crap at the bottom.

When they�d finished building the wall, it went all around the town and looked pretty good. At the north end they built a whopping great gate, with big bars on it, but they couldn�t decide on a good name for it so they just called it the B@rgate. *sigh* no imagination, these medieval types. To get in, you had to go through the gate (although these days you can just walk around the side (Burger King to the right, Lush to the left):

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Once you were through the gate, you could turn around and have a look at the other side of it�if you were lucky, the sun would have come out by then!

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At one side, the side facing the sea, they built a big tower so they could see the Frenchies approaching. These days (as there�s been quite a lot of land reclamation since the 14th century) they�d be approaching by car but, back then, the water came all the way up to the stone walls. In fact, the water came up to the stone walls even just 100 years ago or less. Just to prove Im not making much of this up, you can see a ship in the top right which is actually floating on water (unlike the model merchant vessel, embedded in the concrete by the side of the road � also top left)

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Once yer actual Frenchie merchant dude had sailed up the street by the swimming baths and the big glass-fronted hotel and M@rks and Sp3ncer, he could tie up his boat and go have a look-see around the town.
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�Oi, Monsieur! Mettez votre bateau ici! Par les arches!� cried the boatmen, �Attention! Mindez-vous les lines jaunes or vous will gettez une billet de parking!� or something.

So. Francois ties up his boat, disembarks and enters the town through the picturesque arch and up the street. This is the oldest street in the town and still looks pretty much as it would have looked then (apart from the steps right at the bottom which are outside some OAP flats and so have to be a little bit more substantial and a bit less slippy and cobbly)

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Through the arch, up the OAP steps then up Blue Anchor Lane, with a lovely view of St Michaels Church (or L�Eglise de Saint Michel as it doubtless said on the tourist parchment):

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At the top of Blue Anchor Lane, if your Frenchie Dude had stood around long enough � and lets face it, they do like to hang around in crowds, mostly at the bottom of escalators, or in the doorway of MacDonalds, or knocking stuff off the shelves in TK Maxx with their brightly coloured backpacks � they could have had a look around Tudor House. Although, they�d have to stand around for about 200 years, as, being a Tudor House, it wasn�t built til 15something or other.

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Skip forward a couple of hundred years and your visiting French dude, or Kate Winslet or anyone really, could have stayed here:
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Its swanky apartments now, but back in 1912 it was a very smart hotel (with its own railway station) from which one could take a horseless carriage to ones first class carriage on one of the other big ole famous ships that was hanging about in the docks.

This one was called the Titanic.

When all the fuss had died down, they built this in the park in memory of all the local men, stokers and back-room boys, who didn�t quite manage to make it back home. There were quite a few of them as this town was the Titanic�s home port.

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And here�s a close up of the angel as, even when I was a child, I thought was quite quite beautiful, and looked very much like she�d been crying. Although, she may have just been weeping at the way Celine Dion slides into that note (Near, Far, Whhhhhhherrrrrrevvvvvvver Youwa).

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A few years later, the Luftwaffe found that the town�s many churches provided excellent markers for the accurate dropping of bombs. When they weren�t bombing the dockside factories � including a butter manufacturing operation which burned for three days. I know this as my granddad was there the whole time as a relief fireman trying to put the fucking thing out, with my nan at home with two small children, not knowing if he was alive or dead � they dropped the bombs pretty much where they could, including the church of Holy Rood, which was a shame as there were people using it as an air raid shelter at the time.

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It�s a memorial garden now. And a home to winos, junkies and assorted homeless pikeys with scabby looking dogs on bits of string.

Oh, and here�s the cenotaph, just in case I haven�t depressed you enough:

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And that�s the end of the tour laydeees and gennlemen. I leave you with today�s random conversation stopper, courtesy of Jooj (in the car on the way to a party this afternoon).

Mum, you know they can make cheese out of cows milk, and sheeps milk and stuff, yeh? Can you make cheese out of breast milk?

I somehow think that might have a limited market.

Later
S
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