Who nose?

There is almost always something unusual to see in London, if you are on foot, are reasonably observant, and are in the right mood. Sometimes, the things worth seeing are large and obvious, like a film shoot (which always makes me childishly excited) or a statue; other times, the things are small, like an unobtrusive sign pointing towards a "Roman Bath" (as may be seen on Surrey Street), or a brass plaque set into a wall or pavement. Regular readers may already have an idea that I enjoy spotting blue (and other coloured) plaques, commemorating the home or workplace of famous people from history.

On Admiralty Arch, between The Mall and Trafalgar Square, is a particularly small object of interest, and it's one that is often overlooked by passers by. Attached to a wall on the northernmost arch is the nose you can see above. It looks as if it is made of bronze, but I understand that it is made of plaster of Paris and polymer, and it is attached to the wall about eight feet from the ground. I cannot recall how or when I first became aware of it; I might have read something somewhere and gone looking for it, or I might have just spotted it, as a slightly incongruous protuberance on a large public building and landmark.

However I came to find it, I like that it is there. Apparently, it was placed there in 1997, along with around 34 others in various locations around the city, by artist Rick Buckley (www.rickbuckley.net) as part of a campaign against the "Big Brother" society. According to an Evening Standard article in 2011, approximately ten of Buckley's noses remain, including in front of Quo Vadis, a restaurant and private club in Soho, and somewhere outside St Pancras Station.

An odd thing about the noses, which only now occurs to me, is that - possibly because they are of such a mundane object, the human nose - one may be aware of them, but then forget about them when they are out of sight. I have a vague feeling that I have seen the St Pancras Nose which, from the photos I have seen on the web, appears to be a clay red colour, to blend in with the bricks to which it is attached, but I am not absolutely certain. There's something pleasing, however, about a work of art that retains a slightly covert character; although they are not hidden, you will only find them if you seek them out, or discover them by accident, and either way, if you do come across one, I challenge you not to raise a smile.

Steam work

The mighty steam engines that surround the enormous turntable in the Great Hall of the National Railway Museum in York can take away the breath away. Partly, it's the fact that several of the engines gathered here (and the engines on display change, from time to time) are not just the fun little steam engines from most remaining steam railways, but are the enormous giants of steam history - Mallard, the Duchess of Hamilton, the Evening Star. These steam engines are at once beautiful and physically imposing, like mighty wild animals that have - just about - been tamed.

I first visited the National Railway Museum around thirty years ago and, whilst I think I have retained a vague sense ever since of the presence of the engines, for some reason the place was not entirely familiar when I went back recently. Doubtless, this unfamiliarity may have had something to do with a change in displays, and in museums in general, over the intervening three decades, but as I walked around these shining testaments to engineering, it dawned on me that I was experiencing them from an entirely different level to last time. Aged around seven or eight, I was probably a couple of feet shorter than today, and the engines around me must have been even more vertiginous and awe inspiring than they are now.

Visiting today, one doesn't need to remember what the experience of viewing these machines was like as a child, however, because there's something immensely childlike about being allowed to be in close proximity to such vast objects. I realise that plenty of people find great joy and fulfilment in watching modern trains go by, and I am certainly not going to mock trainspotters; the fact remains, however, that, by and large, modern trains don't manage to capture the same sense of excitement, of sheer raw almost animal power, as their ancestors.

The old trains, in comparison, along with the obvious mechanics that make them go - steam pipes, pistons, cylinders, crank shafts - they can also be almost heartbreakingly beautiful; the Duchess of Hamilton (the red train in the picture, above, designed by William Stanier) is "streamlined", meaning that she hides her boiler and pipes beneath a curved red ballgown of immense elegance; Mallard (the blue train, above, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley) is a stylish and graceful curve that one can easily imagine carving a path through the night air, art deco clouds billowing in its wake.

The other thing that makes these objects so fascinating, so enigmatic and worthy of attention, is the knowledge that, when they run, they are genuinely alive, in a way that diesel and electric trains just aren't. Steam engines (in the UK, at any rate) rely on the burning of coal - and lots of it - to heat the water to make the stream that drives the pistons that turns the wheels. This belly of fire, like a dragon's, relies in turn on the hard manual work of a fireman (and it does usually appear to have been a man's job) physically shovelling coal - tons of coal - into the firebox.

Today, standing in the cab of the Mallard, it's hard to imagine how it must have felt when engine was at full speed (it still holds the world speed record for a steam engine, which it reached on 3 July 1938, of 126 mph (203 km/h)). The heat, the roar of the engine, the fire and the wind, and the smoke and dust from the coal are almost unimaginable, but time spent among these mighty beasts is the closest many of us are likely to get to what must nevertheless have been a thrill.

Feeling a bit King's Cross

King's Cross station in London has changed a lot in recent years. For the longest time, passengers were disgorged from the underground station into a grimy, frequently rainy, forecourt under a sprawling, utilitarian, and deeply unlovely awning. Pedestrians were squeezed between a wall of dull glass-fronted kiosks and the busy Euston Road. Inside the station, passengers huddled together, in a crowded and confused space before the train tracks, hoping to catch sight of their train listing on the display boards. There were few seats to be had, and the whole experience was, on the whole, pretty dismal and depressing.

Britain's railways, dating back to their early days, contain examples of some spectacular engineering and architecture. Following the decline of (and massive underinvestment in) the railways in the 1960s, however, the nation's railways and their buildings felt for many years like a coma patient in terminal decline (pun half-intended). Stations became grimy utilitarian spaces, where they had once been glorious statements of an expanding nation's self-confidence, and it felt like there would be no reversal of the relentlessly downwards spiral.

Then something happened, in relation to Kings Cross, at any rate. Between 2005 and 2007, a £500 million restoration plan was put in place, the old mess of buildings in front of the station was done away with and, on 19 March 2012, the new - glorious - station concourse, shown above, was opened to the public. It occupies a space to the left of the old station and, with its organic-looking vaulted roof, new shops and a mezzanine floor with restaurants, it now feels as if passengers are welcome to the station rather than, as was the case before, a regrettable inconvenience.

I arrived at the station early for my train, and wandered around the new concourse, utterly entranced. It does perhaps, speak volumes for the previous standard of railway travel in Great Britain, that a decent location warrants surprise and pleasure, but be that as it may, I found myself delighted. I pottered around the large airy space, marvelling at how sensitively the new merged with the old, each enhancing the other.

The original station offices, which I cannot recall at all from the old station, have now been repurposed (or, perhaps, returned to their original, logical, purpose) as ticket offices and shops, and the original yellow London brick buildings feel, if it is not too fanciful, to have a restored sense of pride. I was pleased, but not entirely surprised, to discover that in 2013 the restoration project had been awarded a European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award.

King's Cross is known to millions of Harry Potter fans across the world as the location of Platform 9 3/4, and the Harry Potter Store to one side feels appropriate, as does the luggage trolley disappearing into the brick wall. When I was there, a long queue of fans was waiting to have their photo taken, Hogwarts scarves flying, pretending to be about to join the Hogwarts Express. Elsewhere to my childish delight, a falconer was flying his hawk around the space to deter pigeons, and the station felt - as I like to imagine it might have felt when it was first built - like a vibrant and exciting place to start a journey.

Shelling out for the underground

Margate, on the northern coast of Kent, is an unusual place. On a sunny day, and they do occur, the beach around which it is set presents an appealing arc of sand, along which a glittering sea laps, attractively. To one side, the striking Turner Contemporary art gallery - a modern addition to the waterfront, and an attempt to trigger wider investment - draws the eye and a lot of visitors who, but for its existence, would probably have come nowhere near this otherwise somewhat dilapidated seaside town.

This is partly because, behind the gallery and seafront, lurks Old Margate. Bits of it, without question, are attractive and interesting, and blue plaques record the home of John Le Mesurier and Hattie Jacques (whose birthplace is also marked, here), and the building where Eric Morecambe and his wife held their wedding reception. Other parts of Old Margate are, regrettably, more problematic. Like many British seaside towns, with the rise in package flights to sunnier climes, Margate suffered from the decline in "traditional" seaside holidays, and its descent towards (if not downright into) borderline poverty is etched on its crumbling buildings and neglected spaces.

Walking away from the sea front, past buddleia-bedecked derelict sites awaiting money or inspiration, or both, the atmosphere, whilst not exactly threatening, is nevertheless somewhat less than welcoming. All towns and cities have their slightly unloved, but ultimately utilitarian, areas and Margate is hardly to be blamed for appearing to have more than its fair share of them. Nevertheless, the further from the sea we walked, the less sensible the plan that we had seemed to be.

Eventually, the road we were seeking came into view, and we turned left, climbing up a sloping and otherwise entirely residential-looking street. A little way up, on the right hand side, was the entrance to the building we were looking for, if "building" is quite the right word. We had arrived at the "Shell Grotto", an underground passageway, in essence, lined with shells; an exceedingly strange attraction, in an extremely unlikely location.

After paying our entrance fee, we wandered into a small back room, which contained background information on the grotto, such as it is possible to ascertain, which does not appear to be much. For example, one of the signs posed the questions, "Why was it built? When? Who by?" and answered them concisely with, "We don't know."

Descending a small stairway at the back of this room, we found ourselves in the grotto proper. A shell-lined circular underground corridor with an arched roof leads to a small atrium with a domed ceiling, through which daylight enters. Beyond this, a further passage gives access to rectangular room known somewhat sensationally as the "altar chamber", one end of which is blank cement, a testament to bomb damage from the Second World War.

As with a lot of the Grotto, definite information is sparse, so whether it was part of some religious temple, or just somebody's crazy whim is impossible to say; the grotto appears to have been discovered (or, at any rate, its existence made public) in 1835, but other than that, the rest is largely speculation, including just how old it actually is. Whatever the reason, date or individuals behind its creation, it remains an arrestingly odd place, and definitely worth a visit. Just don't go expecting to learn anything very definitive, other than perhaps what it is like to be in a shell-lined tunnel underground.

Wainwright away

Between 1955 and 1966, Alfred Wainwright published seven volumes of a pocket-sized walkers' guidebook called "A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells". In the course of doing so, he identified 214 hills and mountains (known as "fells") in the Lake District in Northern England which have come to be known, collectively, as "the Wainwrights". For those of us who are so inclined, myself included, it has become a common past time to walk or "bag" those fells and to "do the Wainwrights".

Not all of us, however, have ready access to the Lake District, and so the process of walking all 214 fells can take several years. Fitter and, for the slower among us, more annoying people have achieved the same thing in six or seven days, but I like to think that they could hardly have savoured the experience. Another advantage about the process being more drawn out is that each time I return to the Lakes, I experience anew the sensation of joy and happiness that comes from the effort of propelling myself over beautiful landscape, with often even more stunning views around me.

And so it was this weekend, when I returned to the hills, almost ten months after my last visit. Having started my car journey pleasingly early, I arrived in the North Lakes in good time to climb Binsey, a low Wainwright, somewhat detached from the main bulk of fells that he catalogued. As it can take me at least five hours' driving to get to the Lakes (sometimes as much as seven or eight, if the traffic is against me), I have occasionally considered some Wainwrights as "expensive", meaning that the effort required to get to and then walk them is relatively great.

If I were to have travelled here to climb Binsey on its own, and nothing more, it would have been an extremely "expensive" hill, being only 447 m (1,467 ft) high, and so removed from its neighbours that it would not have been particularly practical to combine it with any other hills. As it was, I had a longer walk planned for the next day, so this was a bonus. Being only a pleasing 50 minute climb there and back from the car, this gently walk was also exactly what I needed after my drive.

Looking back south over the Skiddaw massif and Bassenthwaite Lake (the only "lake" in the Lake District, trivia fans; the others have "mere" or "water" in their names) having reached the modest summit, I felt refreshed and renewed, almost instantly. The fresh air, the bright sunlight, the endorphins, all combined to blow away the cobwebs that can accumulate, living predominantly indoors over winter, and I found myself grinning broadly, despite myself.

The next day, I walked and walked and walked. I had been planning to climb two other Wainwrights, but as I wandered over the fells, and saw the proximity of several others, I ended up climbing five. I turned back from a possible sixth, as the wintery wind filled with razor-sharp droplets of freezing rain, which pinged harshly against my face, but I was still satisfied. Looking back, on my way off the hill, the wind and rain having abated and the sun breaking through the clouds again, I wished, for a moment, that I had pressed on, but you never know what the weather will do in the Lakes, and it could easily have got worse.

The hills will still be there another day, I considered, and it's always good to have something to come back to.

Hodge your bets

In Gough Square in the City of London stands the above statue to Hodge, Dr Johnson's cat (whose ears, I can't help but feel, are actually just a little too big). I first met this Hodge around Christmas time, one year, when he had a collar of tinsel, and a pleasingly festive air. He stands, on a plinth, outside Dr Johnson's house, on which is written "HODGE a very fine cat indeed belonging to SAMUEL JOHNSON", repeating a quotation attributed to him in in James Boswell's Life of Johnson. Dr Johnson is supposed to have said of his pet "He is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed."

There is something deeply humanising about hearing about how famous historical figures interacted with their animals, and indeed the names they gave to them. Hodge is a great name for a cat, but I think that I slightly prefer the name given by Edward Lear to his tubby tabby cat - Foss. I have also always liked the story about Hodge, again told by Boswell, that Dr Johnson would go out himself to buy oysters for his cat, rather then make is servants do it, so that they wouldn't dislike Hodge for having been put to extra work.

Jurassic Parklife

Sometime in 1852, sculptor and natural history artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was commissioned to create 33 "life-size" models of extinct animals (including, most famously, dinosaurs) out of concrete, to be displayed to the public. The fact that the very idea of dinosaurs was relatively new (the name "Dinosauria was only given to these creatures by Sir Richard Owen in 1842) and not altogether well-understood (Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" was not published until 1859) does not appear to have dissuaded Hawkins unduly. Over the following three years, accordingly, and in collaboration with Owen and other paleontologists, Hawkins set about creating the arrestingly odd collection of figures that are still on display in the grounds of Crystal Palace in South London today.

I had heard about these unlikely beasts years before, but only recently had determined to actually make the effort required to visit them and was still unsure what to expect. The Crystal Palace site is, itself, a remarkable remnant of times past. Although it was the second location of the enormous glass exhibition hall, first erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, just about all that remains of it is the footprint of the giant building. Below this are the surviving steps leading down to wide terraces, whose glory days of supreme manicuring are, presumably, long gone.

The building itself burned to the ground in 1936, having been moved from Hyde Park (and greatly expanded in the process) in 1854. Wandering about the ruins today, and seeing tantalising hints of what might have been, tucked away behind wire fences and beneath the undergrowth, here and there, it is hard to escape the feeling that the world that the Victorians experienced, for all that it had undoubted and extreme deprivations for many, was also almost unbelievably breathtaking; an age of supreme ambition. Even before its move and inflation, the original Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, 128 feet (39 m) tall and with 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) of floor space, and in its new location its scale only increased.

Today, several levels below where the Crystal Palace once stood, despite years of ridicule for their appearance, once dinosaurs became better understood (and their 1850s appearance having been dismissed as inaccurate), having been ignored, overgrown, rediscovered and restored (more than once), the dinosaurs still reside beside their pools of water. They were most recently restored in 2002 and are now Grade I listed buildings (pleasingly, the same classification as Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster). They are, without question, an odd day out. In fact, and with all due respect to them, they probably do not merit a complete day in themselves (if you're interested, it's also worth checking out the Park Farm, nearby, as well as the ruins of Crystal Palace) but they are certainly worth a visit.

They are broadly laid out in different geological eras, and include figures of prehistoric mammals, but it is the dinosaurs, including the iguanodons, pictured above, that are the real draw. Don't go expecting a real life Jurassic Park experience; these beasts are static and don't really accord with our current understanding of what dinosaurs looked like. Thinking abut it, however, we really shouldn't be too smug about what we consider to be "knowledge"; in my lifetime alone, for example, dinosaurs have gone from being widely believed to be big green scaly monsters, to brightly coloured feathered creatures,. Any assumption that our current era really "knows" anything should, within certain parameters, be treated with great suspicion.