The guide winter 2014print

GUIDE

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the WINTER 2014

A GUIDE TO BRITAIN FROM BRITAIN’S BEST GUIDES

PRESENTING THE PAST DAN CRUICKSHANK, BBC PRESENTER AND HISTORIAN

BRITAIN ON FILM • THE MAGIC OF HARRY POTTER AND THE INDUSTRY OF BIRMINGHAM • LEGENDS, LIES AND LORE

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Contents 4

News The unnatural history museum; star-gazing in Northumberland; a prefab history museum; Hertford College celebrates its former female students

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Interview Presenter and historian Dan Cruickshank tells Sophie Campbell about his passion for historic buildings

12 Legends, Lies And Lore Fact and fiction from British history

Sue King, Chair to the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides

14 Britain on Film Marc Zakian uncovers the story of British film – from its history, to its locations and movie stars

A WARM WELCOME TO ‘THE GUIDE’...

20 Tour de Force Two expert guides tell us about their tours – from Harry Potter to Birmingham

26 My Favourite…

Blue Badge Guides on towers, ships and museums

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Editor: Marc Zakian

Publisher: Guild of Registered Tourist Guides ©2014

Editorial Assistance: Mark King

Design and print: MYPEC Tel: 0113 257 9646 W: www.mypec.co.uk

Project Manager: Maggie Barnes-Aoussou

Display advertising: Andy Bettley T: 07846 979625 E: andy@mypec.co.uk

T: 020 7403 1115 E: marketing@blue-badge.org.uk

This magazine is produced by the Guild of Registered Tourist Guides – the national association for Blue Badge Guides (the highest guiding qualification in Britain.)

Email: theguide@blue-badge.org.uk • www.britainsbestguides.org

ENGLAND

LONDON

WALES

NORTHERN IRELAND

SCOTLAND

GREEN BADGE

ISSN: 2053-0439

Front cover photo: Marc Zakian

T: 020 7403 1115 E: marczakian@blueyonder.co.uk

In this issue Sophie Campbell interviews TV presenter and historian Dan Cruickshank.

London Blue Badge Guides have much to thank him for, especially when they take visitors to Spitalfields.

Two centuries ago the area was home to Huguenot silk weavers, whose attics hummed to the sound of busy looms. In the 1970s, Cruickshank was instrumental in saving these historic houses from demolition.

The silk looms hum no more. But it is still a vibrant area, with Sunday markets selling the foods and clothing of people from the many nations who have settled there. But there are also dark stories to tell: in 1888 Jack the Ripper committed his notorious murders in this area.

1888 was also the year that the world’s first moving images were filmed, in Leeds. In the main feature our editor, Marc Zakian, uncovers the history of Britain on film, following the stories of our great directors and actors, and guiding us through some of the country’s iconic film locations.

The locations featured in the Harry Potter films have become tourist attractions. Blue Badge Guide Henrietta Ferguson takes us on a ‘Potty’ tour, and recounts the stories that fans of the boy wizard love to hear.

From the ‘Dark Arts’ we travel to the ‘Black Country’ and the City of Birmingham, where guide Ian Jelf takes us on a tour of its industrial heritage. Lit by the light of the full moon, inventors and scientists shared their ideas at meetings of the Lunar Society – their ingenuity fuelled the growth of Britain as a great manufacturing nation.

We hope the stories in this magazine will inspire you to take a tour with a qualified Blue Badge guide. They will enlighten you with fascinating snippets from their storehouse of knowledge, and open your eyes to the wonders of our nation’s rich and diverse heritage.

Welcome to the sixth issue of The Guide.

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NEWS History, Culture and Events f The Unnatural History Museum

Denisa Podhrazska, Blue Badge Guide, Czech.

BLUE BADGE TOURIST GUIDES Blue Badge Tourist Guides are the official, professional tourist guides of the United Kingdom – recognised by the local tourist bodies and VisitBritain. The Blue Badge is the UK’s highest guiding qualification, awarded only after extensive training and thorough examination.

There are over 1000 Blue Badge Guides in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – each region has its own badge.

We guide in all the UK’s major tourist attractions, as well as its cities and countryside.

In 2013 Guild guides worked with over 1.5 million UK visitors The Blue Badge is the qualification of excellence in heritage guiding.

The Guild of Registered Tourist Guides is the national association of Britain’s Blue Badge guides. Since its foundation in 1950, the Guild has dedicated itself to raising and maintaining the highest professional standards.

Our guides work in the UK’s museums, galleries, churches and lead walking, cycling and driver-guided tours throughout the country. Our members work in over 30 different languages. If it can be guided, we will guide it.

To find out more or to book: 0207 403 1115 guild@blue-badge.org.uk www.britainsbestguides.org

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Where can you find a mermaid, voodoo dolls, a miniature woolly pig, flying cats and dancing rats? In the wonder-cabinets of London’s new museum of curiosities, The Last Tuesday Society.

This little shop of horrors in Hackney is created and curated by the post-modern antiquarian Viktor Wynd. Wynd (his preferred form of address) describes himself as a ‘boy who never gave up collecting’. In 2005 he installed his curios in a Victorian high street shop, where he offered lessons in taxidermy (the new museum is stuffed with stuffed stuff), a lecture programme and a venue for Halloween celebrations and Goth dinner parties – guests sit around a table that contains a skeleton beneath a glass coffin lid.

This November Wynd transformed his shop into a museum. The £3 ticket price includes a cup of tea in the museum cafe, which is decorated with coral and an ‘unhealthy

sprinkling’ of dead animals. On request, the curator will don his red velvet jacket and give a guided tour.

This bizarre bazaar is themed, from natural world objects – including a giant woodlouse, Dodo bones and the skeleton of Mortimer the lion – to medical samples and instruments, erotic illustrations, surrealist art prints and a collection of Furbies exhibited for maximum comic incongruity.

The Last Tuesday Society takes its name from a 19th century movement dedicated to ‘pataphysical studies’, the investigation of the absurdly mysterious world ‘beyond the beyond’. Wynd has brought this curious philosophy to a corner shop in east London – a Night(mare) at the Museum has come to Hackney.

The Last Tuesday Society. 11 Mare St, London E8. Five mins from Bethnal Green Tube, Daily 10am-10.30pm

s from around the UK

Photo: G Fildes

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DARK MATTERS

Photo of Natasha Kaplinsky: Robert Taylor

The second season of star-gazing has started in Northumberland.

In December 2013 the area became Britain’s first Dark Sky Park, a part of the country that protects the night-time environment and limits outdoor lighting. Northumberland is now the third-largest area of protected dark sky in the world.

This autumn, events will be held across the region, with many opportunities for everyone to get involved in star-gazing. The main focus is Kielder Observatory, which will hold a series of nightwatch events where the public can attend astronomy lectures and observe the night skies.

Discover Northumberland with a local Blue Badge Guide: www.neetg.co.uk

Ladies First ABSOLUTELY PREFABULOUS The post-war British ‘prefab’ provokes humour and affection in equal measure.

Following the WW11 bombing, some 150,000 of them were built to accommodate returning soldiers. The simple two-bedroomed, prefabricated bungalow was a homely symbol of postwar austerity. Designed to last for ten years, many survived into the 21st century, but their numbers are rapidly diminishing.

The Prefab Museum in Catford is the vision of photojournalist and curator Elisabeth Blanchet, who is working at the south London Excalibur Estate. With 186 buildings, it forms the largest surviving group of post-war prefabs in the UK. The

estate is being demolished, but one prefab is being kept to house a social history museum.

The museum has caught the imagination of a generation of people who grew up with the prefab. Visitors have helped finance the project via a successful internet Kickstarter campaign that raised £15,000. This money will go some way towards preserving the prefab as a place where residents and visitors experience oral history, photographs, artworks and films recalling the post-war period.

For more info visit: www.prefabmuseum.uk

Hertford College, Oxford was founded in 1282 and for centuries it was a male enclave.

Portraits of its Fellows and Masters line the college hall, beruffed priests and stern dons staring down resolutely from wood-panelled walls and not a single woman among them.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the year female students were first admitted to the college, the likes of Jonathan Swift and William Tyndale have made way for 21 new portraits, all of them women. Hertford was one of the first all-male Oxford colleges to accept women and the exhibition includes graduates nominated by current staff, students and alumni.

The bold, black and white photographs feature former students from all walks of life, including broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky, philosopher Baroness Warnock and world champion rower Stephanie Cullen.

For a Tour of Oxford with a local Blue Badge Guide visit: www.britainsbestguides.org

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Interview: Dan Cruickshank

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The television historian Dan Cruickshank tells Sophie Campbell about his passion for historic buildings

PRESENTING THE PAST When Dan Cruickshank says he was down at the pool the other day, he doesn’t mean swimming. He means the Pool of London, the stretch of water between Tower Bridge and London Bridge that once bristled with shipping, bringing in goods from across the known world.

“I was there just recently,“ he says,“and I saw two men pull a timber figurehead out of the water about three feet high, early 19th century I think. It looked like an Inca or a South American Indian.”

The men rang the Museum of London and kept the figure in water, quite correctly, but he found out later that when the museum wasn’t interested they sold it for £50 on eBay.“I really mind about that,” he says wistfully,“I would have bought it like a shot.

Bloody right! It’s the biggest and best thing I’ve ever seen found on the foreshore.”

Cruickshank, 65, is an architectural historian, academic and activist who, until the mid-1990s, was busy lecturing, working in writing books and journalism – unknown to the wider British public.

Then he was asked ‘to turn some of my stuff into telly’ and in his mid-forties found a gift for intelligent television presenting, both in Britain and abroad.

His passion for history, professorial demeanour and distinctive speaking style – ‘Did he whisper?’ is the first thing everyone asks (he didn’t), have made him a household name. He still fights for causes, and he continues to write prolifically. He is

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currently finishing his sixteenth book, his ‘life’s work’, on his beloved Spitalfields.

Dan Cruickshank was born in London and brought up in a large, late 18th-century Bedford Estate house on Gower Street. Asked about his earliest London memories, he goes into a frenzy of self-examination.

“I have to explore my brain in terms of this question because you have false memories, of course,” he argues,“I was born in 1949 and I think I remember the Festival of Britain site; the Tories destroyed almost everything to do with it in 1951, but the shot tower on the South Bank survived for a while. I remember the site and I remember the shot tower. Do you know how they work? They dropped molten lead from a great height into a tank of water to make lead pellets.”

It’s this discursive style and his huge enthusiasm for his subject, particularly if it involves his own city, that make him so beguiling. He also isn’t afraid to say what he thinks; about buildings, about the city and about the people who influence the daily existence of both.

The Skylon – the 300-foot high, tapering cigar of aluminium, lit from within at night, that towered above the Royal Festival Hall – symbolised the 1951 Festival of Britain. It featured in one of his early TV appearances, part of the BBC2 series One Foot in the Past.“There are several pieces still around,” he says, “the demolition chap has one, the Museum of

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Dan Cruickshank was born in London and brought up in a large, late 18th-century Bedford Estate house on Gower Street

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Interview: Dan Cruickshank

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Euston Arch

London has two bits, and the architect has one as well. It wasn’t dumped in the River Lea: that was, in fact, the Euston Arch.”

The Euston Arch is another great Cruickshank passion. He is a cofounder of the Euston Arch Trust, which campaigns to rebuild it. This was the largest Grecian Doric arch ever built, fronting London’s first intercity railway terminus at Euston. It was completed in 1838 but destroyed in the 1960s, despite widespread public outrage and strenuous efforts by early conservationists, including the poet John Betjeman.

“I desperately want to remember the Euston Arch,” he says, ”but I’m not sure that I really do.” He pauses,“I’m sure I do. ”The names of the destinations on the arch… so evocative… and now HS2 [the proposed High Speed Two railway from Euston to the West Midlands] may bring Euston to life again, so that failed campaign, weirdly, is becoming reality. That’s the way of the world, that’s the way things go.”

The Arch itself went, not quite into the Lea but into a canal near today’s Olympic Park. In the 1990s, Cruickshank and his team found a quarter of a giant fluted column there, its Yorkshire gritstone edges as sharp as the day they were quarried almost 200 years ago. Just before the London 2012 Olympics, they fished out over 20 more.

He speaks with enthusiasm – and gratitude – about his phase of filming abroad. Enthusiasm, because he saw extraordinary places and things: Yemen, Mali, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq before and after the fall of Saddam, the Yazidis in Kurdistan. Gratitude because

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it is no longer – and may never be – possible to see them again in that volatile part of the world.

Instead he is once again focusing close to home.

Home, in the literal sense, is the 1720s house he shares with his artist partner and his daughter Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic St Pancras Station on a handsome Georgian street in Spitalfields. Or rather, half a handsome house prices, has changed beyond Georgian street, the other half was belief.“It’s almost incomprehensible demolished by British Land, the now,” he muses,“but no one came here property developers, in 1975. unless they worked here, there were “In the 1960s, Spitalfields was a no tourists. The market gave it a Georgian fragment on the edge of dreadful authenticity; there were London,” he says.“The fruit and veg amazing sights and sounds, it was market was nocturnal, so that kept the lurid, it was strange. There were pallets developers away, but the historic and boxes of food and strange people buildings were just rotting. They were lived here and amongst it all were listed in the 1950s but they were going, these rickety, gaunt, unloved Georgian house by house. The last square of terraces. Nobody wanted them.”

1730s merchant palaces went for a As he arrived, the last of the Jewish car park.” community was disappearing, and With his friend and colleague Colin Bangladeshi newcomers were arriving.

Amery, now director of the World Sixty years earlier the area was 99% Monuments Fund for Britain, he wrote Jewish. Now, he says, there is ‘barely a a book called The Rape of Britain. A shadow’ of the kosher delis and donor read it and gave them £10,000, businesses that once stretched as far as so they set up the Spitalfields Historic Aldgate and Whitechapel. There was a Buildings Trust to try and save what synagogue in a back garden on was left.

Princelet Street, now it’s home to the Once British Land started its Museum of Immigration. demolition, around 40 activists – “I think I probably arrived at the architects, historians and people who perfect moment,” he says,“by the early cared about the area – squatted the 1980s the greedy lawyers and remaining buildings. The papers called developers had been pushed away, it the ‘Elder Street Siege’ and in the Denis Severs’ museum was open, end, the developers relented and put families were moving in and people the houses on the market. were doing up places properly. The Cruickshank joined the queue and restaurants on Brick Lane were bought one for £15,000. charming. All these victories are Since then the area, along with its pyrrhic in the end, because developers

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Dennis Severs’ House

“There were amazing sights and sounds, it was lurid, it was strange. There were pallets and boxes of food and strange people lived here” are clever and cunning and they preserve a few buildings. The only people who can afford to live in them are the bankers.”

He notes that British Land are back in the area, redeveloping and rebranding a piece of land between Spitalfields and Shoreditch. He doesn’t seem bitter though, more philosophical. He observes that in the end, however hard you try, you realise that most things either go backwards or stay the same.

You can’t always hold back the tide.

And on that note, he courteously brings the conversation to an end. He has a book to finish and a programme to do.“It’s about the Gilbert Scott dynasty of architects,”he says,“We’re calling it Great Scotts! of course.”

Whisper it softly, it should be one to watch.

Reminders of Jewish Spitalfields

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Interview: Dan Cruickshank

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Factfile Great Scotts! The Family that Built Britain will run on BBC Four as part of the BBC’s Gothic season this November.

Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust, 19 Princelet Street, Spitalfields www.19princeletstreet.org.uk

He also isn’t afraid to say what he thinks: about buildings, about the city and about the people who influence the daily existence of both 10

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M

TOUCAN PLAY

helsea home tti filled his C se os R el ri ab bat artist Dante G cluded a wom 19th century menagerie in e Th ed to s. w al lo im al and of an e dinner table with a parade th to t gh ou te tti la r ho was br meals. Rosse ng called Top, w ri du e ec pi in a cowboy rge centre essed the bird dr e sleep in the la H . an uc ama and a to dining-table. purchased a ll a around the am ll e th de ri it to hat and taught

LEGEND

A Dog’s Life The turnspit dog was a feature of every large 16th century kitchen.

The small cooking canine would run in a wheel that turned a roasting spit in the fireplace. This breed was small enough to fit in the wheel and trained to run so the food would cook evenly.

Queen Victoria kept two retired turnspits as pets. By the 1900s, the breed had died out.

LI

OLD WIVES SALES Until 1857, it was legal for British husbands to sell their wives. According to newspapers, in 1802: ‘A butcher, sold his wife by auction at Hereford Market.

The lot bought for £1-4s and a bowl of punch’. In 1807 the press reported: ‘One of those disgraceful scenes, which have, of late become too common, took place on Friday at Knaresborough. Owing to some jealousy, a man brought his wife and sold her at the market cross for 6d and a quid of tobacco!’

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FACTS AND FIC

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MICE COUNT

HALF A MILLION MICE LIVE IN THE LONDON UNDERGROUND

NDS

NAPOLEON’S BONY PART After defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the British island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. Some historians claim that Napoleon’s penis was amputated during his autopsy, possibly by the Emperor’s priest Abbé Vignali. In 1916 a British collector acquired the ‘Vignali Collection’ and in 1972 the putative penis was put up for sale at Christie’s auction house in London. On failing to reach the asking price the lot, including Napoleon’s member, was withdrawn.

IES, AND

FICTION FROM BRITISH HISTOR Y

In 1811, nearly a quarter of all women in Britain were named Mary.

ALE TALES

There are stories of medieval Ale Conners testing the quality and strength of beer not by quaffing, but by sitting in it. They travelled from pub to pub clad in sturdy leather britches. A sample of beer was poured on a wooden bench and the Conner sat on it. If the ale proved suitably sticky when they stood up, it was pronounced fit and ready for consumption. Unfortunately there is no contemporary evidence at all for British ale Conners testing beer in this peculiar way.

Bum Deal In the 16th century there was a tax known as buttock-mail.

This was a fine levied by the Scottish church on anyone who had sex outside marriage. The normal punishment was a public confession, but by paying a fine the convicted fornicator could avoid public humiliation. Mail was medieval term for a monetary tax – from the same root as blackmail – and buttock needs no explanation!

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Vivien Leigh: ©National Portrait Gallery

BRITAIN ON FILM 14

THE FIRST PICTURE SHOW

In 1888 a camera looked down from the top window of Hicks Ironmongers in Leeds. Behind the lens was its inventor Louis Le Prince.

His grainy images of traffic crossing the town bridge are the world’s first filmed moving pictures.

Two years later Le Prince disappeared from a train in France.

Scotland Yard searched for him, but his body was never found – fuelling

Le Prince’s film of Leeds Bridge

Feature

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MARC ZAKIAN UNCOVERS THE STORY OF BRITISH FILM – FROM ITS HISTORY, TO ITS LOCATIONS AND MOVIE STARS speculation that he had been murdered by jealous rivals. The ‘Father of Cinematography’ never received the recognition he deserved.

William Friese Greene was the first person to use celluloid film in moving pictures. In 1889 the British inventor filmed scenes in London’s Hyde Park, yet his innovation was ignored (the Lumière brothers are credited as the ‘inventors of cinema’) and Friese Greene went bankrupt.

He collapsed and died in 1921,

ironically while speaking at a meeting discussing the poor state of the British film industry.

His Highgate cemetery tomb commemorates him as: ‘the inventor of Kinematography’.

The first successful British movie was Incident at Clovelly Cottage.

Filmed in 1895, the film brought a fleeting touch of glamour to its location of Barnet and paved the way for the rise of film as popular entertainment.

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Film became popular entertainment and four thousand cinemas were built during the early 1900s. By 1945, moviemad Britons were going to the ‘pictures’ twice a week.

But the sudden success of the movie theatre was followed by an equally swift decline. Cinema’s nemesis – television – had arrived. The small screen entertained people at home, and by 1980 some three quarters of the country’s grand picture houses were gone, turned into bingo halls or demolished.

Then, unexpectedly, the silver screen fought back. From a low point in the 1980s, UK film admissions trebled. New film studios opened; in 1990s the WW11 airplane hangars of Leavesden were converted for the filming of the James Bond, Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises, while Pinewood Studios is doubling in size and creating a new outpost in Wales.

British film continues to thrive, appreciated throughout the world for its unique mix of costume drama, offbeat comedies and literary adaptations.

GREAT BRITISH FILM STARS CHAPLIN

VIVIEN LEIGH

In 1889, the year after moving pictures were invented, a boy was born just off London’s Old Kent Road. When he was two, his father left leaving his mother destitute. By seven he was living in a workhouse. When his mother was admitted to an asylum, he went to live with his alcoholic father and by 14 he was homeless.

Ten years later he was living in Hollywood and in 1916 signed a movie contract for $670,000 a year, making Charlie Chaplin, at 26 years old, one of the highest-paid people in the world. Chaplin’s rise from misery, through music hall performer to become the first global movie star could only be realised in the United States. But his street tramp character – who first appeared on screen a century ago this year – wore an English bowler hat, and had its roots in London’s streets and workhouses.

In the 1950s Vivien Leigh was the filmstar half of the world’s most famous showbiz couple. Her husband, Laurence Olivier, was merely the ‘greatest stage actor in the world’. There are stories of people being so overcome by their glamour that they would faint on seeing them. Leigh found this kind of attention trying.

Born in India to British colonial parents, she studied theatre at London’s RADA with a determination to become a great actress. Hollywood turned her into a movie star; in 1939 she won the ‘Search for Scarlett O’Hara’ and played the lead in Gone with the Wind. In 1951 she reprised her stage role as Blanche DuBois in the film of A Streetcar Named Desire. Leigh won Best Actress Oscars for both films. While there have been many great British film actresses, she was one of the few who was undoubtedly a film star.

HITCHCOCK

ELIZABETH TAYLOR

In 1904 a five-year-old boy was sent to Leytonstone Police Station in (what was then) Essex. He carried a note from his father, requesting the officer to lock him away for five minutes as punishment for behaving badly.

Alfred Hitchcock went on to become the master of suspense movies, making Blackmail in 1929 – the first British sound feature – and a series of films at Islington’s Gainsborough Studios, before relocating to Hollywood. His short stay in a London police cell gave him lifelong fear of policeman and wrongful accusations, a theme that ran through many of his great films.

Few child actors go on to succeed as adults. Hampstead-born Elizabeth Taylor defied these odds, graduating from a Lassie film via National Velvet to become an MGM star during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Her fame peaked when she played Cleopatra to her future husband Richard Burton’s Mark Anthony. Taylor won an Oscar in 1966 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and continued to act until the Flintstones in 1994. Married eight times – twice to Richard Burton – his Valentine’s Day present to her one year was ‘La Peregrina’, the famous pearl, formerly owned by Queen Mary I of England.

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© James Brittain Photography

Feature

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LOCATIONS, LOCATIONS, LOCATIONS Old Royal Naval College

LONDON ROYAL HOSPITAL, GREENWICH When Queen Mary II instructed Christopher Wren to build a hospital for retired seamen in 1694, she might have noted that, ‘in the future it should also serve as a great place for the making of moving pictures’. No sooner has one film set

wrapped here, than another arrives. It has doubled as the grounds of Buckingham Palace in The King’s Speech, served as French Barricades for Les Misérables, staged wedding number two in Four Weddings and a Funeral and hosted Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow for The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Most recently, it stood in for a Berlin street in Muppets Most Wanted, and featured prominently in Thor: The Dark World.

ST BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT, LONDON This exquisite Norman church, survivor of the Reformation and the Great Fire, stood in as Nottingham Cathedral in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It was where Joseph Fiennes, prays for forgiveness in Shakespeare in Love, where Lord Blackwood is apprehended while preparing a human sacrifice in Sherlock Holmes and where Hugh Grant fails to marry ‘Duckface’ in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

OXFORD Oxford colleges have provided both inspiration and locations for a host of British films.

St Bartholomew The Great

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The Riot Club

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Pride

Shadowlands tells the story of CS Lewis and his relationship with an American poet. In the film, Lewis’s college Magdalen and its 15th century chapel, feature in a scene where the couple attend the May Day morning festivities – an ancient tradition celebrated by choristers of the College choir, who sing from the top of the chapel tower at dawn. The Eagle and Child pub, home to the Inklings writers group, also appeared in the film.

In 2007, Phillip Pullman’s Oxford-based literary trilogy was brought to the screen as the Golden Compass. The author’s former college, Exeter stands in as the fictional Jordan College.

The university town is the setting for The Riot Club, which tells the story of Oxford’s elite, tearaway bad boys and their activities as members of the infamous Bullingdon Club.

WESTMINSTER The current Brit-hit, Pride recreated the 1980s miners protest on London’s Westminster Bridge, while the upcoming film Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep as Mrs Pankhurst, is the first movie to be allowed to film inside the Houses of Parliament.

MANCHESTER Manchester Town Hall, with its iconic Gothic Revival interior, regularly stands in for the Houses of Parliament.

It posed as the Palace of Westminster for Robert Downey in Sherlock Homes (2009) and in the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. It also features in the upcoming Frankenstein, starring Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe.

LIVERPOOL Liverpool is the chameleon of film locations, frequently disguising itself as other cities. For Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit it was ‘Moscow’ in a night-time car chase, with the ‘Three Graces’ buildings and the River Mersey providing a ‘Russian’ backdrop. For Chariots of Fire much of ‘Paris’ is actually Merseyside. The British Embassy, where the Prince of Wales tries to persuade Liddell to run on the Sabbath, is Liverpool Library and Town Hall; the Paris Olympic stadium is Bebington Oval Sports Centre. Scenes for the 2011 action adventure Captain America were filmed at Stanley Dock and the city is the backdrop for Belfast in 71, a film set during the Northern Ireland troubles.

Manchester Town Hall

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Feature

National Media Museum, Bradford

Louis Le Prince single-lens camera

Paul’s Theatrograph

Little Nellie

MUSEUM VISITS NATIONAL MEDIA MUSEUM, BRADFORD This museum’s galleries are home to the National Cinematography Collection. We asked Associate Curator Toni Booth to choose his ‘Top 5’ items.

Louis Le Prince single-lens camera, 1888. The camera that filmed the ‘world’s first movie’.

Agnes May Turner on a swing, 1902. The stills from a film made by photographer and inventor Edward Turner are the earliest existing examples of colour moving pictures.

Teeth worn by Christopher Lee as Count Dracula. The actor designed and wore these fangs in the 1958 Hammer Horror film Dracula. When he broke a container of red fluid on the fangs, ‘blood’ dripped from the ends of the teeth.

Theatrograph Projector Mark 1, 1896. Robert W Paul first demonstrated his projector at Finsbury Technical College in 1896 (on the same day as the showing of the Lumière Cinematographe in London). It’s the prototype for all modern film projectors.

Lantern slides from the Polytechnic Institution, London. From 1850 the Polytechnic in Regent Street was

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renowned for its lantern shows. Huge lanterns projected large, hand-painted slide shows. This was ‘cinema’ before the moving picture was invented.

As well as the permanent exhibitions, the media museum has three cinemas – including an IMAX screen – and hosts two film festivals each year. www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk

LONDON FILM MUSEUM This central London museum is currently hosting Bond in Motion, an exhibition of vehicles from the James Bond films. Highlights include a scale model of the Westland helicopter featured in Skyfall and iconic Bond cars such as ‘Wet Nellie’, the Lotus Esprit S1 from The Spy Who Loved Me, the Rolls-Royce Phantom III from Goldfinger and the Aston Martin DB5 from GoldenEye. London Film Museum, 45 Wellington Street, WC2 Bond exhibition: 10am-6pm every day until March 2015 Tickets £14.50/£9.50 www.londonfilmmuseum.com

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College Hill House near Edinburgh

Oxenford Gatehouse in Surrey

STAYCATIONS Seen the film? Want to stay in the location? Here are some historic movie venues you can sleep in.

A Gothic Temple, built in 1741 to a design by the architect James Gibbs, dominates the gardens of Stowe in Buckinghamshire. It features in the Bond film The World is Not Enough, where Bond attends the funeral of Elektra’s father.

At first glance, Oxenford Gatehouse in Surrey looks like an ancient building. It was actually built in 1843 by Augustus Pugin, architect of our national parliament

building. Pugin’s medieval confection is so authentic that it appeared as the home of Maid Marian in the Russell Crowe Robin Hood film.

College Hill House near Edinburgh featured in the climactic scenes of the 2006 blockbuster The Da Vinci Code.

To stay in one of these buildings visit: www.landmarktrust.org.uk You will be contributing to the trust’s mission to restore and preserve historic buildings in the UK.

A Gothic Temple, built in 1741 to a design by the architect James Gibbs

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Tour de force

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POTTY ABOUT HARRY

Words and pictures: Marc Zakian

Blue Badge Guide Henrietta Ferguson tells us about her Harry Potter themed tours

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Photo: Sean Elliot Photography

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Alnwick Castle, Northumberland

“My fascination with the boy wizard began 14 years ago,” explains Henrietta.“I was taking an American family around Britain. By day three their young boy had tired of museums and was bored with counting sheep from the car. His mother asked if I wouldn’t mind playing a Harry Potter audio book for him, I obliged. By the time we got to Edinburgh I was hooked.

“I left the family at the airport and bought the CD of the second book for my drive back to London. When I arrived, I was so engrossed that I sat outside my house in the car for an hour until the story had finished.

“I bought each of the seven-book series as soon as they came out. I even queued outside Waterstones bookshop waiting for the third book to be released at midnight. When the first film appeared in 2001, I tried to borrow my young nephew so that I wouldn’t be the only grown-up without a child in the cinema. I needn’t have worried – over half the audience were adults.

“Those enthusiastic movie goers inspired me to create a Harry Potter locations tour. But the producers were secretive about where it was filmed and a lot of backgrounds were difficult to identify. Fortunately, when the DVD came out I could freeze frame the action and work out where scenes were set.

“Fans on the internet were arguing about where the films had been shot. As a Blue Badge Guide I had a head start and could immediately recognise a location like St Paul’s Cathedral – the church’s geometric staircase features in the ‘remembrall’ scene in the fourth film.

“The films have turned London’s King’s Cross station into a tourist destination. In the first movie Harry departs for Hogwarts School from platform 9¾ (they filmed at

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Christ Church College, Oxford

Tour de force

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“The films have turned London’s King’s Cross station into a tourist destination” “What’s great about these tours is that I can help a younger generation discover British history” platforms 3 and 4). The station installed a Harry Potter luggage trolley on the concourse for visiting fans. Unfortunately, during a recent refurbishment they removed a wrought iron bridge that appeared in the first film. If anyone knows where it is, would they let me know.

“London’s river crossings feature in several films. In the third movie, the Knight bus gets stuck on a bridge.

People thought this was London Bridge, but I worked out that it is actually Lambeth Bridge. Tower and the Millennium bridges appear during the death-eaters scene in the HalfBlood Prince.

“The Leaky Cauldron Pub – entrance to Diagon Alley – was filmed in two places in London. For the first movie they used Leadenhall Market in the City of London, for the third film it moved to Borough Market.

“The highlight of a Harry Potter tour is Christ Church College in Oxford, the setting for Hogwarts Hall. It features in the first three films, but when they were preparing the fourth movie the producers wanted to park their vehicles on the college meadow. A farmer was growing wheat there and they asked him to harvest it early. He refused. I am friendly with the bowlerhatted college porters, who tipped me off about this.

“I am pleased that the Harry Potter films have highlighted some of England’s less well-known tourist attractions, from the stunning medieval Alnwick Castle in

Northumberland – where the Quidditch flying scenes are filmed – to the little-known Goathland Railway Station on the North Yorkshire Moors, which acts as Hogwarts Station.

“The stories are so powerful that some of my younger visitors are convinced they are real. One boy was annoyed with his mother when we arrived in Oxford, because he thought he was actually going to attend Hogwarts School. A five-year old girl was upset that the wand we bought from the Harry Potter Shop didn’t work. She wanted to go back and exchange it. I told her that if she waved

For a tour with Henrietta visit: www.henriettaferguson.com Leadenhall Market

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the wand at every traffic light we were stopped at, she could magic them from red to green – she was delighted.

“For older visitors who have grown up with the books, the stories create a common bond. I was contacted by three girls in their 20s, one Spanish, one Argentinian and one Mexican.

They got to know each other on a Harry Potter internet forum and saved up to travel to London, where they met for the first time. I took them to Oxford. They dressed up in character and I found myself walking the sober ‘City of Learning’ with group of young adults wearing a cape, carrying a wand and sporting a Gryffindor scarf and garters. I didn’t wear a cape!

“What’s great about these tours is that I can help a younger generation discover British history. It’s difficult to involve children in a cultural tour, but mention Harry Potter and you get their attention. So when I am showing them sites that have been used in the filming, they are subconsciously learning about the real history of the building.

“It’s extraordinary to think that this is the result of the imagination of one woman, JK Rowling. Her powerful idea of a young boy wizard, fighting for good, has enthralled a generation of readers and film fans, and it has led them on pilgrimage to discover Harry Potter and Britain.”

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Birmingham born Blue Badge Guide Ian Jelf tells us about his city’s industrial heritage

MADE IN BIRMINGHAM “I have lived my whole life on page 74 of the Birmingham A-Z,” quips Ian Jelf.“I grew up on a Victorian terrace in Bearwood, and went to the local Warley High. It was a tough, working-class school, where one fellow pupil, Frank Skinner – now a well-known comedian – ran a dinnermoney protection racket.”

Like generations of Brummies, Ian’s parents made their living in the city’s factories.“My dad worked for a tube manufacturer, my mum at pen-nib makers. Their only ambition for me was that I didn’t go to work in a factory.”

So Ian went to Wednesbury College in the Black Country.

“It was only ten miles down the road, but culturally a world apart. I often couldn’t understand the local accent. They add extra syllables where there aren’t any: nine is pronounced ‘noi-on’ and you is ‘youw’. Black Country dialect has remnants of the old Anglo-Saxon, so ‘two houses’ are ‘two housen’ and ‘you are’ becomes ‘youw bist’.”

When Ian left college he took a job at Birmingham Railway Museum, this inspired him to study for the Heart of England Blue Badge. When the museum’s budget – and

“Like generations of Brummies, Ian’s parents made their living in the city’s factories”

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“In medieval times it was an insignificant market town of a thousand people. By the 19th century it was the fastestgrowing city in Europe”

Soho House

Jewellery Quarter

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Ian’s job – were cut in 1995, he became a full-time guide.

Though Ian didn’t end up working in a factory, he spends a lot of time talking about them.“Birmingham was born from manufacturing,” he explains.“In medieval times it was an insignificant market town of a thousand people, by the 19th century it was the fastest-growing city in Europe.

“But manufacturing didn’t begin here with the Industrial Revolution,” he emphasises.“The city is on the main route from Stafford, Warwick and Stratford down to London. The medieval lords exploited this by importing coal and ore from the Black Country, producing iron goods and sending them to London. The pattern was established; mined in the Black Country, manufactured in Birmingham, sold across the world – and talked about in Solihull.

“During the 1600s, local metal workers forged Civil War sword blades that cut bloody swathes through Charles I’s army. That is why the Royalists attacked the town and why, since then, we have been a refuge for non-conformists. That tolerance has had a huge impact; many of the city fathers, such as the Quaker Cadburys, come from this tradition.

“Two men defined the city’s manufacturing history, Matthew Boulton and James Watt – an industrial love affair immortalised on our £50 note. Boulton was the son of a Birmingham buckle and trinket-maker who took over the family business. Watt was a Presbyterian Scot, who came to city to collect money owed to him from a company bought by Boulton.

“Boulton had the innovative idea to locate all his workers in one building. So he bought some cheap land and built the Soho Manufactory. It was, arguably, the first modern factory in the world. When Boulton met Watt in 1774, their mutual passion for industrial invention launched the factory revolution. Boulton manufactured Watt’s improved design for the steam engine – the machine that powered the mines and mills of Britain.

“Made in Birmingham’ is still something to be proud of, but I would say that, I was made here too” “Birmingham’s tribute to Boulton was to restore his house as a museum in the 1990s. The building celebrates an extraordinary polymath who installed the world’s first gas lights in 1802 (so the factory could run at night) and developed an early ‘photocopier’. Boulton was a keen member of the Lunar Society – a group of entrepreneurs and thinkers, including Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, who met during the full moon to plot the creation of the modern world.

“If Boulton founded Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain made it work. He came to the smoke-filled city from a genteel life in London, and never truly left. His shareholding at his uncle’s screw-making business made him rich. He sold up and became the city mayor, with big plans for urban improvement.

“He was inspired by Bournville. Built in the 1890s by the Cadbury chocolate dynasty, this green utopia was Britain’s first garden village. Chamberlain used it as his blueprint for the construction of a series of airy, village-style estates to accommodate the growing number of factory workers. They would even vet potential residents to make sure they were of ‘good character’. His legacy continued and Birmingham was the largest housing provider in Europe until well after WW11.

National Trust preserved Back to Backs

“As Mayor, Chamberlain believed that the city should run utilities for the common good. He used council money to buy the local gas and water companies and to make sure Birmingham had clean water and affordable lighting. No modern mayor could imagine that kind of power. He used profits to rebuild large parts of the city centre and fund the city’s museum and art gallery.

“This political and industrial legacy is Birmingham’s tourism story. Sarehole Mill is a rare survivor, an 18th century mill that once belonged to Matthew Boulton, now restored to working order. And in the city centre, a courtyard of backto-back Victorian workers’ houses that was once a slum is now a National Trust restored visitor attraction.

“The city’s craft traditions are best seen in the jewellery quarter. Forty years ago, the only visitors to these streets and alleys were shopkeepers looking for stock, but now they have opened up to the public. You can see the jewellers at work and order hand-made designs. There’s also an awardwinning jewellery museum.

“The quarter retains its industrial charm. You walk up rickety staircases and knock on the door to find a maker.

I have done this on numerous occasions, most importantly when we chose my wife’s engagement and wedding rings.

“The jewellery quarter is a modern day snapshot of what made this city. Small, independent craftsmen, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. I am always reminding visitors that there are more people in the city working in manufacturing than in services. ‘Made in Birmingham’ is still something to be proud of, but I would say that, I was made here too.”

For a tour with Ian Jelf visit: www.bluebadge.co.uk

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MY FAVOURITE

Blue Badge Guides show you their favourite places around the UK

...TOWER Archirondel tower symbolises Jersey’s position as an outpost of the British Isles, a situation that has existed since 1204. I like this permanent reminder that the island was garrisoned by British troops and has been defended by a local Militia since then. The island’s Governor, Sir Henry Seymour Conway, started building these towers in the late 1770s; they pre-date English Martello towers by almost 15 years. This tower at Archirondel Bay was the penultimate one to be built in 1794. Unusually it has a gun battery at its base and three, rather than four machicolations around the top of the tower.

Arthur Lamy Blue Badge Guide Jersey arthur@arthurthebluebadgeguide.com

...MUSEUM …is the British Museum. As a guide I enjoy working there today, but it was also a great “playground” for my children when they were young.

They really enjoyed looking at the model of Vindolanda fort, and the written tablets found in the Roman fortress. These amazing wooden ‘postcards’ have survived almost 2,000 years. Their messages are timeless, one man is annoyed with his surly friend who ‘hasn’t sent me a single letter’; another is a birthday party invitation. When my elder daughter finished her archaeology degree this year, we visited the fort on Hadrian’s Wall.

When I drove my younger daughter to study archaeology in nearby Durham, I couldn’t help but feel how much the museum had influenced me, and my family.

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Jane Hickey Blue Badge Guide London jane.hickey@btinternet.com

...SHIP Dazzle ship is a surprising stripy sight that meets you down at Liverpool waterfront. Part of the First World War commemorations, rather than being a sombre tribute, it is actually a delightfully playful piece. Dazzle paintwork was the brainchild of artist Norman Wilkinson, a Royal Navy volunteer.

The intention was not camouflage but distortion. Abstract shapes and colours were used to disguise the form or direction of travel to confuse enemy fire. The stripes are the work of 91-year-old Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez and add a fun splash of colour to the waterfront.

Harriet Gilmour Blue Badge Guide Liverpool City Region harrietgilmour@gmail.com

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