This is a garage in Weymouth, that I sketched in 1997, but never got round to colouring in properly. So I've just finished the job with the wonder that is Paintshop. And speaking of wonders, I wonder, too, if the garage is still there. It did look a bit unloved. I've had a quick virtual wander around Weymouth on Google Maps' Street View, but couldn't see it. So maybe it's been demolished.
Which reminds me of a pub just around the way from here, the Cock of the North, made famous (well, relatively famous) in The Young Ones, in which it appeared as the Kebab and Calculator.
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...it used to be a really (well, fairly) nice pub. An unashamedly 1960s job. Circular, with the bar in the middle. Light and airy, with the big windows. And then it got made over as a sort of bogus Edwardian thing, and it's all gloomy and (last time I was in there) pongy with the ghosts of a million cigarettes and pub lunches. I suppose that the pub's problem, along with the garage's , was that it fell outside the parameters of Buildings That People Want To Preserve Because They Are Very Much Of Their Time.
I don't know the area but I suspect that the pub's problem is that it's not somewhere that people can just "stroll" to. So unless it does excellent food and gains a reputation for being worth the effort no-one will go.
ReplyDeleteI heard onthe radio the other day that something like three pubs an hour are closing in the UK. Sign of the times.
It is quite strollable, and there are v few other pubs around this bit of Bristol- I understand that this is because the Wills family were landowners and disapproved of pubs... the next nearest pub is 0.8 km away, which is a fair distance for a city. I think the facelift was more to do with the way that the original structure was a bit rusty, and rather than repair in the spirit of the original, they did pastiche. There was something absurd about a slathering of Pub Edwardian onto a palpably modern design...
ReplyDeleteLooking at contemporary pubs, I wonder if should any glass-fronted city-centre Wetherspoons make it unscathed into the 2040s will I then perceive it as an architectural gem?
ReplyDeleteI suppose if Banbury railway station's 1950s bridge cafeteria gives me joy then anything's possible.
Who knows, Jenny? -I am biased because I like Brutalism and I like 60s buildings because I have fond memories of them being new and bright. And they were what they said on the tin. Cwmbran New Town was our local shopping place, and it was really rather nice. As opposed to the crappy concrete-cancered poundshop land that it's degenerated into now...
ReplyDeleteI sometimes wonder if I am too much of my time, or the opposite. I daren't even tread on the stairs of thought that will lead me to wonder if anyone would want to preserve me. I like the green garage.
ReplyDeleteHad I realised the that Cock of the North was the Kebab and Calculator I'd have paid it more attention as I passed on my way to the Orpheus. But does that mean the whole show was filmed in Bristol?
ReplyDeleteHad I realised the that Cock of the North was the Kebab and Calculator I'd have paid it more attention as I passed on my way to the Orpheus. But does that mean the whole show was filmed in Bristol?
ReplyDeleteWould you want to be regarded as a National Treasure, though, Graham? -it sounds like the sort of thing that Alan Bennett gets called.
ReplyDeleteYes, Charlie; most of the exterior stuff was filmed in Bristol. There is even a Young Ones trail, apparently. There was a plaque outside the Cock of the North, with some not-entirely-correct information about the Young Ones connection. But I think that's gone now too. Sic transit... like the Richey Edwards graffiti at the old Severn Bridge services. Immortality is quite short-lived sometimes.