Two weeks in England: Detour to Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex; beating the bank holiday traffic; De La Warr Pavilion; Laetitia Yhap art exhibition; Relais Cooden Beach; via Lewes to London; Docklands and Canary Wharf; shopping disappointment; two London shows; Blackheath pub grub; Gatwick Sofitel and EasyJet to Montpellier
It’s over 300 miles (480km) from Liverpool to the Sussex east coast, where I’d managed to convince Roy to take us to spend the night at the Relais Cooden Beach, at Bexhill-on-Sea. (As mentioned before, I do freelance writing and editing work for the Relais Group, which also took us to The Relais Henley the previous week: see Part 1 of Two Weeks in England, here). On the other hand, it would be just a two-hour drive the next day from Bexhill-on-Sea to London, the last stop before France.
We expected a good 5.5 hour drive from Liverpool, plus the frequent pit-stops that this flesh of mine is hostage to; so leaving early was a good idea. Like most Brits, Roy vehemently dislikes being wrested untimely from his bed; but we were surprisingly up, out, and on the road by 7.15am… and that was how we beat the Monday bank holiday traffic.
From Merseyside in NW England to Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex
Bexhill-on-Sea
Relais Cooden Beach is located in the southern part of Bexhill-on-Sea.
Two weeks in England: The Plan; Singapore stopover; nothing to wear; cream tea at The Relais Henley; not visiting Blenheim Palace, Woodstock; not visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford Upon Avon; Roy’s family birthday
It wasn’t easy for Roy to leave the house we’re having built in Perth WA, especially at rather a critical point – our cursed builder went into liquidation, remember? – but this trip had been booked a year earlier. Two weeks in England, then the full month of June in the South of France – bookended by three days in Singapore.
He had planned this first post-COVID trip to England mainly with extended family in mind. It felt well due. His sister Lyndsay and John live near Stratford Upon Avon, so it made sense to kick off with a week there. Then, not having seen Aunty Marjorie, cousin Richard and cousin Kate for far too many years, we would head up to the Wirrall and Liverpool for a few days. Finally, we’d spend four nights in London.
Getting there
We took an SIA flight from Perth to Singapore, arriving on the evening of Sunday 12 May for three days with the ever-hospitable Paul and Salinah. Thanks, guys!
Singapore, all about food and friends… and foodie friends
Now that I’ve done my first Parkrun I’m wondering what took me so long. There’s a Parkrun – a free, timed, 5K run – in most of the places Roy and I spend time in, including the UK, Durban, Singapore, and Perth, WA.
I first heard of Parkrun two or three years ago in in my home town of Durban. Roy and I were cycling gently along the North Beach promenade one Saturday morning with our good friend Jeff Fobb when we were almost mown down by the surging mob – the front-runners go like hell, and it gets very competitive. And there’s another Parkrun along the Umhlanga Rocks beachfront that goes directly past our flat.
When the first Singapore Parkrun was established last year in East Coast Park, we promoted it on the health and fitness pages of Expat Living magazine (www.expatliving.sg). Though it starts only a stone’s throw from the Amber Road condo where Roy and I lived until May this year, I never made it to the run.
My first Parkrun
Magically, my first Parkrun (about a month ago) was also my first run ever with my younger sister, Dale, who lives in Bromley, Kent – anything between 90 minutes and three hours’ drive from us, depending on traffic. Having started running only in January this year, she’s already done plenty of Parkruns, a 10K race and also – to everyone’s astonishment – a half-marathon! I’m hugely proud of her.
Dale and her “Zeroes to Heroes” running buddies
Me and my athletic sister
Leaving behind our snoring husbands – who’d stayed up until 4am to solve the problems of the world over a bottle of vintage tequila – Dale and I walk-jogged the 2km to the start of her local Bromley Parkrun in Norman Park. Meeting some of her friendly fellow-runners from “Zeroes to Heroes” (a free coaching programme), I could only admire their camaraderie and mutual support.
Thames Valley Park Parkrun
Luckily for me, Reading’s beautiful Thames Park Valley Parkrun flags off almost directly across the Thames from where our Dutch barge Karanja is moored at Thames & Kennet Marina – again, coincidentally, less than 2km away as the heron flies. But it’s 6 or 7km away as the foot walks or the car drives, unfortunately: so I have to drive and park, either at the paid commuter car-park at Reading Bridge, or at the free Tesco Extra parking that’s an ideal six-minute trot from the start line.
Like the Bromley Parkrun, it’s a great course: flat and rural, mainly short grass and earthen paths. I’ve done the Reading Parkrun twice, and plan to go back this weekend, now that my bruised knees and grazed elbows have just about recovered from my coming a cropper 10 days ago while running the tow path between Henley and Marlow. (No, I didn’t blog about that. Least said, soonest mended.)
This man was raising awareness for the Samaritans’ Swim the Solent 2016 – using real ales and music as lures
Reading Parkrunners are keen on cake
More about Parkrun
Though “Parkrun” sounds like a translation of “parcour” (or “parkour”), the former is a lot less exotic and lot more attainable than the latter. Parkruns are free, timed, five-kilometre urban or suburban running routes over generally accessible courses that often include a park; and if you watched the spell-binding, bone-crunching intro to the 007 flick Casino Royale, you’ll know that parcour is a very different animal!
Founded in 2004 by one Paul Sinton-Hewitt in Teddington on the River Thames – not too far from the marina where I’m sitting right now – Parkrun has spread to 14 or more countries, including Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Poland, Russia, New Zealand, Denmark, the US, France, Italy, Singapore, Jersey and Guernsey. It’s run every Saturday morning of the year at the same time. It’s easy to find the Parkrun nearest you: go to www.parkrun.com. Register just once online to get your eternal barcode, which you present at the end of the run to have your time registered and posted online.
In preparation, I mentally practised flattening myself against a box hedge to avoid becoming roadkill
Ah, those famously narrow and twisting English country lanes! At first, I wasn’t sure which would be more nerve-wracking – being driven pell-mell by Roy along them (and no, I don’t have the nerve to drive them myself), or running on them. Sometimes there’s room to jump out of the way of oncoming traffic, as in the picture above, but that’s not always the case. In preparation, I mentally practised flattening myself against a box hedge to avoid becoming roadkill.
So I plucked up the courage one chilly June morning and headed out from Chapel Croft B&B, set in the farmland surrounding the town of Biddulph near Stoke-on-Trent, praying that most of the morning commuters to Congleton or wherever would still be nibbling their egg soldiers and slurping their PG Tips.
This being England’s Peak District, the wind was fresh, to say the least, and the terrain challengingly hilly – a far cry from what has been my standard sweaty run in Singapore’s dead-flat East Coast Park. I passed a field full of blanketed horses – a riding school, it seemed – and several beautiful farmsteads, including one with a discreet sign boasting Charollier sheep.
In the end, I had the lanes mostly to myself. There was an uncomfortable moment when two large lorries come head to head on a bend, and I had to stop while they sorted themselves out – clearly all in a day’s work for them.
Back at the B&B, I felt I’d earned my plateful of locally smoked salmon with deep-gold “scrammled eggs” (according to the blackboard special) from landlady Lynn’s own fat and beautiful chickens.
Lane convert
Within the week, I’d braved two more sets of lanes. The first was just beyond Victoria Park, a small industrial suburb of Biddulph, where Piper Boats was putting the finishing touches to our barge, Karanja. (To “snag” the boat, we were spending a somewhat surreal weekend living on board – not afloat, but in the boatbuilder’s big car park – cooking, bathing, washing clothes and so on to test the electrical, water and other systems.)
Unexpectedly beautiful running trail, directly off semi-industrial Biddulph’s Brown Lees Road
Seems that unless you’re in London, you don’t have to go far in England to find countryside. No more than a kilometre from Piper Boats, down Brown Lees Road, I found a pedestrian and cycling track that took me a couple of miles through idyllic fields and meadows to where the houses started again; or I could turn right off the road for another leafy mile or so to another village green.
And then, a week later, we stayed for a few nights with Roy’s sister, who lives in a horsey part of the Warwickshire countryside. In the ice of winter, you can slide dangerously along the slippery lanes and it’s not much fun to be on foot. This time, though it was beautifully dry, the lushly shaggy trees and hedgerows seemed to shrink the narrow lanes still further.
Again, I had them almost to myself: even at 8am on a weekday morning, I was able to count on my fingers the number of passing cars in the course of 70 minutes. And when you walk – as I did the final stretch home to Lyndsay’s – you’re more likely to see the swooping of fat magpies, and the odd bunny-rabbit hopping across your path.
English lanes – like the one above, taken from the passenger seat – terrify me. For Roy, they seemingly hold no fears. As we zip around blind corners boxed off with shaggy green hedgerows, I stay safe by keeping my eyes tightly shut, while he revels in the action of driving, punctuated by the occasional expletive as we narrowly escape collision with yet another articulated lorry.
A couple of weeks ago, we drove from Biddulph to Leek and up to Buxton, through the spectacular moorland of England’s Peak District. (We were staying in the northern England town of Stoke-on-Trent, while Piper Boats was finishing our 49-foot Dutch-style barge, Karanja. There’s only so long you can hang around watching busy craftsmen, so it was a good opportunity to see something of the area.)
Long and winding road up to the spa town of Buxton
At 1,000 feet, Buxton itself is in the High Peak district, and billed as the highest market town in the country. Solid and substantial houses and elegant late-17th-century public buildings hewn from the local grey stone recall the various heydays of the town, when the carriages of the affluent must have traversed these same lanes and roads – minus the tarmac and roadside warning signs – to take the waters at this famous spa town, second only to the southern city of Bath. (Buxton, too, was a Roman spa, and again from the Elizabethan era onwards.)
Historic Buxton Crescent and the Old Hall Hotel
It’s soon going to be possible to take Buxton’s waters again – in two or three years’ time, volunteered the construction-helmeted chappie who saw us peering through the fence at the elegant, late 18th century Crescent Hotel, currently undergoing restoration. He even whipped out his smartphone to show the photo he’d taken of the spectacular interior – probably of the old Assembly Room – before work began.
For now, you can wander through the quaint boutiques of Cavendish Arcade, enjoying the Victorian/Edwardian tiles, mouldings and an impressive if slightly gaudy glass domed roof, but especially one of the original marble-lined baths in all its Victorian glory, complete with a winch and pulley system and a wooden armchair to lower you into it. I hope the new spa retains something authentic to the place, and not just another temple to Kerstin Florian or whoever.
