Sunny Hunny

Hunstanton (pronounced "Hunstun" apparently) is that rare jewel, a west facing east coast resort. I arrived very early on a Sunday morning before most places were open, and had a good mooch round. It's a Victorian Gothic model seaside village, built in 1846 by a local landowner with the splendid moniker of Henry Styleman Le Strange.
Later sixties and seventies accretions dominate the seafront, but the centre is pure C19th English seaside. P G Wodehouse set his comic country retreats hereabouts, and characters are named after local villages.

The Golden Lion - formerly the Royal Hotel and more commonly Le Strange's Folly - looks over the sloping green and mini roundabout. The bin men are on an early round.

The Entertainment Centre marks the spot where a Victorian pier, complete with miniature railway stood. It suffered two fires in 1939 and the 1950s before the entire structure was swept away, along with a number of other English piers, in the storms of 1978. The new structure dates from early in the millennium.

The pier was the setting for the 1957 Ealing Movie "Barnacle Bill" starring Alec Guinness.

The war memorial and gardens overlook The Wash, beyond which the distant Lincolnshire coast can be seen. Seafront gardens evoke the shade of E M Forster, and unbridled passion among the geraniums.

A small children's playground. The rocking horse took me back half a century. The reproduction railings are unnecessarily robust, but the putting green cabin is delightful.

The Princess Theatre, previously the Capitol Cinema of 1932, is a splendid modernist-vernacular mix, boasting the largest Carr stone gable in the world. A poster suggests The Bachelors are playing and a Helen Millen film is in the offing.

Hunstanton town hall and tourist information centre.

The Tamworth Tea Rooms. John Betjeman would have appreciated them.

Hunstanton has the finest joke shop in the country, according to a chap who stopped me by the sea front. I wouldn't argue.

There's really no excuse for this kind of thing. A grim brick edifice totally out of keeping with the town.

Hunstanton is something of an anomaly in North Norfolk, a place mostly defined as genteel and elegant, with London second homers and quiet yachting harbours. I liked it very much in spite of its faded glamour and vulgar architecture, and would certainly return.

Saddleworth Pounds

Some things are lost forever. Others go to sleep and are only awoken with much effort. The Huddersfield Narrow Canal slumbered from the 1920s and was officially closed by the LMS railway in 1944. LTC Rolt, canal and rail enthusiast and sometime ghost story writer piloted, but often dragged a boat through in 1948, and a coal merchant was reputed to use a short section into the 1950's but by then it was broken down, dried out and largely filled in until re-opening for business - the leisure business that is - with the new millennium. Look it up, it's interesting stuff. We're heading westwards, towards the Standedge canal tunnel.

This is the new marina that backs onto Tesco at Greenfield, accessed by a lifting bridge from the canal. The fenced off area has "Deep Water" warnings, presumably from a former mill pond behind it, but it looks dry and ripe for development. Note strategically placed tree looking forlorn against the thriving feral saplings to the rear. "Pots and Pans" war memorial in the distance.


The Saddleworth villages are commuting hotspots to Manchester with prices to match, and Uppermill is no exception. The red plastic installation may be a bank repair or a textile artwork.


Railway, canal, river - the usual Pennine Valley business. Less common that each are intact.


Poo bin and Victorian industrial monumentalism. A moment's silence for all the viaducts that didn't survive Beeching's mischief and institutional myopia, please.


Disused mill seen through a line of chancer saplings. The Arthur Rackham tree on the left looks suitably disapproving of the upstarts. Canal bank to front.


Past trades arts feature under new bridge. Shame it's not an exhibition space, I bet lots of artists would like to work with those reflections.


W.H. Shaw, Diggle. A pallet works for 37 years, closed now. Ruritanian clock tower and hillside. Previously Dobcross Looms, now to be a school.


Pallets, extinct.


If these weren't railway sheds, they should have been.


Warth Mills (1919), now home to a variety of businesses including skip hire, a perennial of the post industrial landscape.


Also a café in there somewhere.


The ducks are standing on the entrance to the Standedge canal tunnel. The train enters a little further on.


Reverse view.