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Museum's Pictures
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When deciding where to go today I thought about Crich Tram Museum partly because of this. I remembered that they had an old police call box and knew I wanted to complete the set. Yes I know I'm like some sad train spotter just worse. Turning up like some weird nerd at a Tram Museum with my camera bag, not to collect tram numbers but to take a picture of the police call box. My memory of the Tram Museum was favourable of course so I'm really not that bad. If the Museum wasn't up to much then I'd really not have bothered. To be honest the trip allowed me to add to two of my nerdy collections, the first being Dr Who's House and the second being Chainsaw Sculptures.
Anyway the promise this weekend was for good weather and we were slightly let down and it was rather cold and add to that one tram ride on the top deck outside and I was frozen. Even so it was a good day out what with the walk back where the wood sculptures were. Today there was a small display of Robin Reliants which we saw struggling what with the single front wheel and the tram tracks as the left for the day. Still a good day was had by all and I am sure in the future I'll add some more pictures of the day when there's a quiet weekend.
| 0 comments have been left | 21:39 27 Mar 2011 | Tags: dr. who crich museum phonebox |
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Enough said really. Nothing to do with the beer, or perhaps it is I have no idea. This Beamish however is a living Museum as they call it. It's basically a huge plot of land with a farm, a colliary a town centre, a hall and all sorts of stuff kept to look like it did in the 1800's or early 1900's. It's pretty impressive and a good day out and when I say a day out I mean a day out. The place is huge, so huge it has it's own complicated bus and tram timetable which meant that a load of walking was involved. In fact we ended up having to go before seeing the whole lot, it was a choice of seeing the whole place and being completely walked out or cutting it a little short and still having smiles on our faces.
Anyway onto the picture, as you might be able to guess it's in the Beamish Museum and it's in the town part of one of the buses that you can hop on to get around, just don't do what one person did, as he got on the bus he steadied himself by holding on to the bell rail ringing it by accident which was the signal to set off to the driver who set off which was news to the conductor and the passengers trying to get on. Ooops.
| 0 comments have been left | 12:07 29 Oct 2010 | Tags: beamish bus bank museum |
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Off out this week to test my new FinePix 1600 at the Anson Engine Museum. Not too many good pictures unfortunately so it's not a great place to take pictures unless of course you're a hardened engine head which I think the people who turned up at the same time as us were because one of them turn around to me and said “Do you have many engines?” not really understanding the question becase it initially sounded absurd assumed he wanted to know if the museum had many engines so simply said “Yeah they have loads of different types here” thinking it was a daft question to pose only to be faced with the absurd question again “No, do you have many engines?” and that's when it hit me that to him this was not an absurd question. I was pretty sure that answering “yes I have 2, a Proton 1.6 and a Ford 1.4” was not what he was after.
Anyway back to the museum. It's an interesting place with a guide that starts up the engines and well worth a visit if you're in the area. None of the engines are huge beasts that are half as impressive as the machine in Astley Green Colliery but that would be pretty hard to beat however the guide did mentioned that they were planning to bring in a larger machine as an exhibit.
Well with none of the pictures really turning out that good, I'll have to leave you with this shot of a turn of the century Poynton. I selected Macro mode which to be honest works fantastically but I never got down close enough to the ground to actually get the feel of actually being there. Of course now Poynton looks a bit different though not greatly different to be honest.
| 0 comments have been left | 21:24 16 May 2010 | Tags: engine poynton museum anson macro |
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Dr Who seems to get about a bit which being a Time Lord I suspect is rather easy. Last time I spotted his vehicle at a Dr Who museum, before that I saw it at Crich Tram museum and now the latest spotting was at the Kent Police Museum strangely enough in Chatham's Historic Dock. The Police museum is small but rather interesting with a full display of cap badges for the whole of England a mock prison cell and a cheery retired policeman of 30 years to answer any questions.
Of course that museum wasn't the point of the trip. We were at the historic dock with a range of ships to walk around including a submarine and a ropewalk tour which sort of explained ropemaking giving you the opportunity to view the longest rope shed in thw world at a quarter of a mile long. Unfortunately whilst they were making rope at the time we didn't see anything much going on.
| 0 comments have been left | 14:42 21 Aug 2009 | Tags: dr. who phonebox museum chatham |
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Being a sad sort of chap, when I found out that they made ships out of concrete I really wanted to see one. And now I have. This chap is FCB18 at the National Waterways Museum at Ellesmere Port. The museum is really impressive and I would definitely recommend it unless you don't like boats... or water, then you're best steering clear. It also has a pump house that houses a rather large engine and boiler which is very reminiscent but less impressive then the one in Astley Green but then again it would be rather difficult to be more impressive. Another interesting thing is Porter's row which is a street containing 4 cottages built in 1833 but done up in 1840's-1950's style.
| 0 comments have been left | 20:38 26 Jul 2009 | Tags: concrete boat transport museum |
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Tracking down U-534 was the order of the day on Sunday. We had previously seen the boat at the Warship Museum in Birkenhead. Since then it has been cut up and transferred to somewhere else. All I knew was that it was the ferry port in Liverpool. Sounding easy enough we set out and wandered about near the Liver Building until we were distracted by a bus tour of Liverpool.
£20 and 50 minutes later we were no nearer but hey we had seen a few of the things to see in Liverpool such as ”Turning the place over” a piece of artwork that is intriguing because you have to marvel at the fact that it could be done but left me feeling only on thing. I just wondered... why?
So the hunt was back on an after talking to the bus driver we found that we were the wrong side of the Mersey. So a trip in the Birkenhead Tunnel and just when I was beginning to think the signs for Woodend Ferry port were going to end us up on the road back through the tunnel the signs delivered on their promise with the Uboat Story. It's an interesting Museum. Perhaps I missed it but a little info on how they put the exhibit up would be nice such as how they are going to stop the thing rusting to nothing and why the chose to do what they did. I assume that fact that they didn't reconstruct it was for two reasons, the first being space and the second being that you would not be able to get the interesting views of the inside of the U-Boat.
What's strange is that it looked so much bigger at the Warship Museum but I assume that was to do with the fact that there the boat was above you, at the Uboat Story you're at the same level as someone would have been working in the boat. With so little space, it's amazing how they fitted 52 men and all that equipment into it.
On the way back through the tunnel the radio was interrupted by a Tunnel Police message which caused me to wonder how they did that, closely followed by the thought as to why we were getting radio down here in the first place. Along with all of this came the worry that if this was a Police message then what the heck was going on and what emergency had occurred until the scary clipped female voice announced that it was a test message. Personally I would have preferred the message to start “This is a test message” rather than “This is a Mersey Tunnel Police message” as the stern woman wasn't the quickest speaker.
| 0 comments have been left | 21:52 23 Mar 2009 | Tags: uboat submarine transport museum mersey |
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It's bad Ju Ju to not post a pic for a month so assuming that I'm going to be hopeless nest weekend I found this in archive. A picture of when we went to Crewe.
This impressive eagle is one of four that used to sit on the train works. From reading the stuff in the train museum in Crewe, there used to be four, but the suspicion that when metal was in short supply two of them were melted down but two survive which now sit on the museum.
What's strange as they said in the museum is that whilst there is a clear as day C (for Crewe we can assume or maybe not), there is a H in there which is something I could not see on the day but in the picture is pretty clear... well from the picture I can see anyway. As far as I am aware no-one knows what the H means.
| 0 comments have been left | 20:10 9 Dec 2008 | Tags: crewe museum train |
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Today was a drive out to Wigan and Astley Green's Colliery. It's a strangely informal place similarly reminiscence of the Railway Age Museum, there's the small museum that explains about coal and mining and a brief history of Astley Green, the pit head pictured here and the machine room which is the most impressive part of the museum. Of course this begs the question as to why I don't have a picture of the engine room and that's simple, this was just a better picture. I also doubt that any picture can do the engine room justice. As big and as impressive as a church (there's a picture part of it on the homepage of Astley Green's Colliery) the engine room contains one gargantuan engine that I suspect would be a sight to see when they finally get it going.
| 0 comments have been left | 20:59 26 Oct 2008 | Tags: astley colliery museum mine |
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It was an interesting day but the only picture I got was bad, Perhaps at some point I can go back to the places I saw today to capture the pictures I saw this morning.
Today started with a 20 mile bike ride. Denton->Manchester->Cheadle->Stokport->Denton. The sun was out and the traffic wasn't which was good. It was cold but it was one of those wintry sunny days where the sun spreads a gold hue on everything. The first missed picture was of the Islamic Academy on Upper Brook Street which is situated right next to a church that is crumbling or being knocked down. The image would have been good (I hope) with the sun passing through a stained glass window only because there was no roof on the church. Further down is a new building I haven't seen before which I assume is part of the hospital. It used to be a Happy Eater and sits on the angle between Upper Brook Street and Plymouth Grove. It wouldn't have been much of a pic without the sun glinting from the top of the building. Of course I was more bothered about peddling especially since I'd only completed 7 miles of the full 20 or 21.3 as I finally completed.
Later in the day this is where this picture came in. I have taken a picture of a police call box before which was at Crich's Tram Museum but I don't seem to have put it on here. It's a great day out and I would recommend it. There's so much to see and you don't have to be a train spotter to appreciate it which is similar to the Manchester Museum of Transport where you don't have to be a bus spotter to enjoy it. Anyway this police call box is at MOSI, whether it is a permanent fixture or not I don't know but we were off for the BodyWorlds exhibit which is Dr Gunther von Hagens exhibit of of corpses that have been put through his process of plastination in effect bodies that do not decay with their organs exposed to varying degrees supposedly to educate the layman about how the body works. To me they look too much like plasticine/plastic models of people. Perhaps it wasn't meant for me because there was nothing new here, the basic gist was smoking is bad, drinking is bad, disease does bad things to you and all three can kill you so all I can think is that's it's just pure Voyeurism or perhaps that's the wrong word, but there's a perverse interest to witness what feels like it shouldn't be witnessed which is a sliced up or open corpse, it's just been dressed up as education.
The other two interesting pictures today are of the Etape Hotel in Salford which is an weird block that looks part like a hospital and part like some strange mad European (Dutch I think) building with it's strange coloured outside panels of green blue and grey. Finally with all the building that's going on, on the East side of the Mancunian Way there's a University building in a state of part deconstruction which will probably be gone next time I have a chance to whip my camera out perhaps the reason why I like this is because you get a view into the building, able to see the rooms and offices as they were left, opened up in the same way as Dr Gunther von Hagens corpses perhaps, it's just that the buildings seem more interesting to me, maybe it's the fact that they describe more about people than their individual fragile selves.
| 2 comments have been left View Comments | 20:45 24 Feb 2008 | Tags: dr. who phonebox museum |
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Today's outing was a triumph over traffic. I personally thought that I would get a lie-in but found that my prize for a long week at work was a drive down to the Black Country Museum which should have taken about an hour but with the V Festival on the way, it took nearer to three. As you can imagine with the great weather and the car park which was the M6, I arrived in a wonderful mood.
The Museum seems pretty good. They have rebuilt a street that recreates a street as it would have looked like around the turn of the century. With fully functioning shops and a pub it was quite interesting and with people acting as characters from the time made it quite amusing. Never went to the pub, I don't think they would serve my usual tipple, but the chips fried in beef dripping were pretty good, and going down the mine was really interesting and (unsurprisingly) very dark.
On the way back we did see Duncan, a van owned by Igloo named after Duncan Bannatyne after he and Richard Farley invested in the company on Dragon's den. We didn't see the van called Richard though.
| 0 comments have been left | 20:07 19 Aug 2007 | Tags: museum chippy pub |
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