shewhomust | Entries tagged with sunderland

Considering that much of Saturday's walk was through urban Sunderland, it's surprising how many pictures I took, and I still haven't finished sorting through them. There ought to be a post about the walk, with a pretty picture - autumn in Backhouse Park, perhaps, or the cliffs at sunset - but I'm not ready to write that one yet.

Instead, here's a shot that I snatched because that errant apostrophe appealed to me:

It wasn't until I looked at it on the large screen that I realised that I had caught both

durham_rambler and myself in the picture: his shadow falls across the road on the right, while I am reflected in the window, caught in the act.

The shop is in Hendon, a few strets away from the house where my father grew up.

We had weekend visitors, and had a splendid time sitting around chatting, and showing them the sights, and more sitting around. The sights were mainly in Sunderland, and started out at the Winter Gardens, which I had not previously visited in the spring - there were flowers among the foliage, and the bananas were in bloom. We wandered through the glass and ceramic collections at the museum, where a photograph sent us off in search of the Elephant Tea Rooms:

all of a block and a half away, decorated with elephants (because tea was sold there. Well, obviously) and I don't think I'd ever seen it before... Then on to the coast, Saint Peter's church (where, as last time we were visited, we were pounced on by volunteers and shown round in a helpful but slightly overwhelming way) and a tea break at the Glass Centre. Then home, to dinner and Doctor Who.

We took Sunday more gently, spent the morning wrangling with the crossword and went out in the afternoon to the Botanic Gardens - where all sorts of things were breaking into flower (many but not all of them daffodils) and all had to be admired, and almost all photographed (by all four of us, from a variety of angles).

Our weekend guests left on Monday morning, and we spent the rest of the day working. On Tuesday, since we were expecting D. for an overnight, we needed to do a little emergency shopping (D. food - oranges and white ice cream).

durham_rambler made the inspired suggestion that we go to Lidl in Langley Moor, and visit the nearby antique shop in search of kitchen chairs. By a fluke, the shop was open, and had a set of four rush-seated chairs which I think will suit us very well.

And Lidl lived up to all the descriptions, and provided us with a random selection of foodstuffs: oranges and white ice cream, but also unwaxed lemons and speck and a couple of bottles of wine. The wine department was just odd: premier cru Chablis sat next to Dornfelder (German red wine from the Moselle) above the ice cream cabinets where the heat from the refrigeration units met the warmth of the lighting ("I don't suppose it stays there long enough to take much harm," says D.) My mother would have loved it.

And D. arrived, and we opened a couple of bottles (not from our Lidl haul), including a St Emilion which we actually decanted (was this necessary? I don't know. It was lovely, velvety smooth without being rich, but how do I know what it would have been like without decanting?) and had a very pleasant evening.

The Coastal Footpath is an 11 mile walking route down the coast of County Durham, north to south. I was initially surprised that the coast of a reasonable sized county should yield so short a path, and then rationalised it: the historic county lost large chunks of its coastline to the metropolitan areas, Sunderland to the north and Teesside to the south. After yesterday's explorations I can add that the path does not start at the county boundary, in the north at least.

We, however, did. We parked on Ryhope Green, just into Sunderland, by a plaque informing us that the history of Ryhope Village could be traced back to 930AD, when it was recaptured from the Scots, and that it was "once popular with the Bishops of Durham for sea bathing." I picture a row of bishops, their purple robes kilted up out of the foam, holding hands and treading carefully so as not to lose their mitres... You wouldn't want to paddle there now, though. That word "heritage" in the name of the path? Durham's coastal heritage is the residue of its industrial past, unnatural and spectacular, and that was what we found when we made our way down to the coast: rusting railings, crumbling concrete and a sign warning us off the unstable cliff edges. So we retraced our steps to a path set well back from danger, which took us as far as the first of a series of denes, steep river valleys which punctuate the coast. Back to the main road, then, until we were within sight of Seaham, and a track led towards the sea, skirting a large and bustling car boot sale. At the far end of the track, we reached the next dene, and backtracked again, taking the road into the car park where the walk officially begins.

The first official part of the walk ran through Seaham, technically along the Promenade all the way, though we diverted onto the lower walk along the beach. The old part of the town was interesting, but we were soon back on the main road, at first diverted by views down to the harbour then just grimly along, wondering why the pavement ran between the crash barrier and the highway.

We came at length to Dawdon, where the path leaves the road, at a further car park with interpretative boards, art works and interpretative art works. As usual, the high profile artwork (Alec Finlay's Sky-field, a cluster of windsocks in shades of blue and white) appealed to me less than the nameless arrangement of dry stone wall and timber, half sculpture, half something to which to attach plates bearing - poems? descriptions? acrostics? well, words, certainly. (There will, as usual, be more of my pictures in due course; in the interim, here are some rather better ones) Beyond Dawdon, the path runs above Blast Beach, with its discoloured stones resting in strange dark sands the colour of coffee that's stewed too long, pounded by cappuccino breakers. Up above, the path is bordered by a riot of wild flowers (distinctive flora of the Magnesian limestone, apparently): meadowsweet, bloody cranesbill, scabious, lousewort... A kestrels - and then another - hovered briefly over the cliff edge, silhouetted against the dark sea, barely higher than our heads, before disappearing.

Down into Hawthorn Dene, and - after a few wrong turns - we found the path as it headed out the other side under the railway viaduct, through the fields and past Beacon Hill, not even tempted to divert up to the summit, thankfully into Easington Colliery.

The day was showers and sunshine mixed; the morning mild, grey and showery, the afternoon full of contrasts - the sun shining on the far end of blast beach was the sign that another shower was coming, then, as we grew weary towards the end of the walk, the sun beat down in true August fashion. The only really heavy shower came when we were on the bus back to our starting point, rattling off the windows then passing over, leaving a rainbow arched over the invisible sea.

My brother and sister-in-law, otherwise known as the Bears, have been with us for a weekend visit. One of the many reasons why their visits are always fun is that they are good at excursions: GirlBear is full of ideas for places to go and things to see, and we all enjoy approaching the same kind of entertainments in the same kind of way: accompanied by plenty of walking around, and finding somewhere pleasant to lunch, and discussing what we've just seen.

On this occasion, GirlBear had brought with her a cutting from the Guardian describing an exhibition at Sunderland University's Reg Vardy Gallery called "If There Ever Was: An Exhibition Of Extinct And Impossible Smells". An exhibition of smells: we weren't even sure that the word 'exhibition' could be used of smells, let alone how the gallery might deliver on its promise of lost smells, extinct smells, the scents of extinct flowers and the perfume Cleopatra wore. But we were game to find out.

The gallery is quite small: a single T-shaped room, all painted white, with one arm of the T cut off by a sales desk, providing a space for the gallery attendant. Around the rest of the room, a panel at eye-level carries fourteen pieces of text, with a vent running along beneath (there are pictures on the Gallery's site at the moment, though the site design means I can't link to them directly, or guess whether they will be there permanently). You pause to read a passage, and your presence (presumably) triggers a mechanism which releases the corresponding scent.

"Scent is the essence of physical presence and lends proof to our surroundings. Contrastingly, the fourteen scents re-created for If There Ever Was are inspired by absence. Like a cabinet of intangible curiosities, their forms are drawn from disparate stories throughout history for which few, if any, objects remain. And although it would be easy to pass the exhibition off as a work of pure fantasy — the product of an over-active perfumer's imagination - beneath the olfactory theatricality lies a serious scientific basis, says James Wong, a botanist at Botanic Gardens Conservation International, UK."

"It would be easy to pass the exhibition off as a work of pure fantasy..." Well, yes, the presentation has a deadpan quality which made me wonder whether the whole operation was an elaborate spoof, a fine but invisible new suit for the emperor. An exhibition of smells is a sufficiently elusive undertaking in itself, without going a step further into an exhibition of extinct smells. James Wong assures us that it is scientifically impeccable, but then James Wong's job at Botanic Gardens Conservation International (according to their web site) is to create news stories highlighting the organisation's role in plant conservation. A list of artists are described as contributing, and several fragrance houses are credited; it's a sign of my ignorance in matters olfactory that none of these names meant anything to me.

The fourteen text passages - offered as contexts for the scents, rather than descriptions - varied in length, but shared the same apparently simple tone; at first this made me suspicious, especially as some of the stories were hard to believe: can the Stasi really have collected the scents of suspects on file? (Apparently yes; the BBC has a picture). But the story of Jesse Tafero (executed in the US, the scent of his last meal recreated for the exhibition) rang a bell. And the scents that went down with the Titanic are real too. (Thanks to Glass Petal Smoke blog for its helpful list of all fourteen items).

So although my initial reaction was to see the entire exhibition as one big piece of conceptual art, it's possible to regard it as a showcase for fourteen works of the parfumier's art. In which case I'm afraid that the technology is not up to the task imposed on it: the scents were not delivered clearly, or in most cases strongly, enough. A scent composed by Christophe Laudamiel, in an attempt to recreate the scents believed to protect against plague, contained among other ingredients, vinegar, rose oil, raspberry leaves, beeswax, angelica, orange peel and clove: it was almost the only one I could identify at all, as the clove scent of the mouthwash my dentist used to use. All of the subtlety was lost in transmission. There's also a book of the show, a prettily bound little volume, but as soon as I opened it, the tipped in scent samples all mingled in one overwhelming smell.

Afterwards we discussed which lost scents we might nominate for a follow-up exhibition. "Anthracite," said

durham_rambler. "Steam engines." I'm tempted by any number of historic wines: Château Margaux 1848, perhaps? Or how about a madeleine dipped in linden tea?

P.S. This seems to be the definitive documentation (PDF).

desperance (and

samarcand and

durham_rambler, for that matter), I was in Sunderland yesterday for the first public appearance of Bryan Talbot's extraordinary book Alice in Sunderland. For as long as I've known Bryan - for five years, at least - Alice has been a work in progress, an exploration of his adopted city, and every meeting has brought a new titbit of information, a new page of dazzling artwork, in which huge amounts of detailed information are organised into a lucid argument (here's an example). Sunderland tends to be overshadowed by its neighbours on the Tyne, it never aspired to City of Culture status; for long centuries it was not a city at all but an industrial town ("the biggest shipbuilding town in the world," my father used to boast), but a town whose history goes back to the earliest days of English Christianity.

Part of that history is my own; my father was born in Sunderland, and until my grandmother died when I was seven or eight, we spent our summer holidays there. I remember being shown the stuffed walrus in the museum and told that this was the very walrus about which Lewis Carroll wrote in The Walrus and the Carpenter (it's gone now, although a walrus has appeared in nearby Mowbray Park). It has been a particular pleasure to share with Bryan some of the stories I know from that connection - the Victoria Hall disaster about which William McGonagall wrote so movingly, for example.

So last night's event - the opening of an exhibition of artwork from the book at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art - was very much a Long Awaited Party. It also had a slightly surreal quality: Alice in Sunderland plays a number of tricks with reality, illusion and the depiction of reality, and last night's gathering did much the same thing. The artwork on display was wonderful, but so much of the finished artwork was created in the computer that the framed drawings - the pure and often uncoloured line - could be misleading. I heard one visitor remark "I don't know why, I'd expected it to be in colour..." and had to reassure her that yes, most (though not all - this is a book that has some of everything) pages were fully coloured. Some of the fascination for me was seeing the skeleton beneath the finished pages. But if the art on display was like the bones without the flesh, many of the guests were characters from the book, escaped from its pages and walking around: Bryan himself, but also

desperance who appears with Colin Wilbourn in the section about the sculpture project on which they collaborated and Michael Bute, on whose research into Lewis Carroll's north-eastern connections Alice draws heavily. Bryan Talbot has called his book "a dream documentary" but you could have wondered which dreamed it.

This isn't a review of Alice in Sunderland: apart from anything else, I was unable to buy a copy, as the gallery had seriously under-ordered (in fairness to them, they were clearly accustomed to exhibitions to which a catalogue is an optional extra, and hadn't grasped that in this case it was all about the book), and their stock of thirteen copies vanished away as softly and suddenly as you could wish. Which is fine, because there will be signings in bookshops, and I will have plenty more chances. So this is just a jubilation that something as ambitious and unexpected and magnificent as Alice in Sunderland can actually happen.