A Birthday Trip to Broadway

On Tuesday morning I woke up with a 59 year old man beside me, how the hell did that happen?! 

Yes, it was Jon's birthday last week and we decided to continue with our Cotswold odyssey and visit the village of Broadway. Just down the road from Tewkesbury, Broadway is postcard perfect and known as the Jewel of the Cotswolds. The "broad way" is the wide grass-fringed main street, centred on the Green, lined with chestnut trees and honey-coloured Cotswold limestone buildings, many dating from the 16th century. 

An ancient settlement daing back to Mestholithic times, it was settled by the Romans and by the Tudor era the village had grown rich with the Cotswold wool and cloth trade. By the 16th Century Broadway had become a busy stagecoach stop, breaking up the journey between Worcester and London, with the village providing all that was needed by the weary traveller, grooms, places of refreshment and extra horses but, following the introduction of the railways and the opening of a station at nearby Evesham in 1852, the once thriving village became a backwater, a haven of peace and tranquilty with Victorian artists and writers drawn to Broadway with the Arts and Crafts Movement eventually making its home in the area. 

Known as the Colony of Creativity, the group started with William Morris and included Edwin Austin Abbey, Francis D Millet, Alfred Parsons, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Frederick Barnard, JM Barrie and John Singer Sargent. Russell House (above) built in 1791, on the outskirts of the village, became an integral part of the scene with several of the American artists lodging here and the extensive gardens immortalised in many of the artworks they produced includung Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885- 6) by John Singer Sargent (below).

Just over an hour's drive away from home, it really does feel like another world, even on a dull day like last Tuesday, that buttery yellow Cotswold stone gives the impression that the village is bathed in sunshine and the majority of visitors were Italian and American with not a Midlands accent to be heard!

No regimented municipal planting schemes here, the chaos of the cottage garden reigns supreme. 

This ancient stone post was deliberately defaced during World War 2 in case it revealed valuable information to invading German paratroopers.

The War Memorial was erected in 1920 and designed by FL Griggs in the English Modern style. 

As usual, we played the Which house would you live in if money was no object? game....we were spoilt for choice. Its hardly surprising that rock stars and celebs like Kate Moss and The Beckhams move to The Cotswolds, if we were millionaires we'd join them! 

Housed within a gorgeous 17th Century former coaching inn, Broadway Museum and Art Gallery has some fabulous artworks by John Singer Sargent and a wonderful cabinet of curiosities filled with everyting from 300BCE Greek busts, Egyptian goddesses and Mediaeval trinketry.

We were fascinated by this 17th century grafitti. 

We loved the look of Broadway Deli and headed there for lunch. At £20 each, they were probably the priciest salads we'd ever eaten but they were incredible and so big we didn't need to eat again until the following day. Jon loved his traditional Polughman's and mine, with a vegetarian take on a Scotch egg (a soft boiled egg encased in a spicy chickpea batter) was the stuff dreams were made of. 

The Lygon Arms (below) dates from Medieval times and hosted the leaders of both sides of the 17th-century English Civil Wars. Its sign has been re-painted many many times. In 1377 it was named The White Hart after Richard II but following his defeat by Henry IV it became the White Swan, emblem of the house of Lancaster. During Henry V's reign it became The Hart & Swan and in the days of James I The George. The current name dates from 1841 after its owner, General Henry Beauchamp Lygon, who fought at the Battle of Waterloo.

The Gordon Russell Design Museum celebrates the design pioneer Gordon Russell and the company that bore his name. Integral to 20th-century British craft and manufacturing, Gordon Russell championed accessible, innovative, and high-quality design, evolving from Arts and Crafts through to Modernism, post WWII's Utility and Mid-Century Modern. The £8 admission fee allows unlimited access to the museum for a year and also gives ticket holders 50% off admission to Court Barn, the museum of craft and design, in nearby Chipping Camden. The gift shop is splendid.

Russell's designs are stylish, timeless and equisitely made and visitors are encouraged to touch some of the exbibits on display, to sit on the chairs, open and close the cupboards and drawers and rummage through his tool collection.

Broadway village is a short walk from William Morris's favourite hangout, Broadway Tower, which we visited HERE and also very close to the maximalist's dream National Trust property, Snowshill Manor which I've posted about HERE. Well worth a trip to the Midlands!

Broadway village is a short walk from William Morris's favourite hangout, Broadway Tower, which we visited HERE and also very close to the maximalist's dream National Trust property, Snowshill Manor which I've posted about HERE. Well worth a trip to the Midlands!

Of course, Jon's birthday wasn't all gentile tearooms and posh villages, we also celebrated with an all-dayer in Walsall's Wetherspoons and the fun continues this week ...we're off to Devon where we'll be trading at Beautiful Days and Jon, being an ex-punk, is very excited to see The Sex Pistols! 

What a line-up! 

See you next week.

Exploring The Mediaeval Streets of Tewkesbury

We were off sightseeing again last Saturday but this time we were a lot closer to home, visiting Tewkesbury with our friends Lynn and Brendan. A Mediaeval market town in the county of Gloucestershire, Tewkesbury stands on the confluence of the Rivers Avon and Severn and was named after Theoc, a Saxon who formed a hermitage here in the 7th Century. It's only an hour's drive from home, every time we go we ask ourselves why we don't go more often! 

The town is probably best known for the Battle of Tewkesbury, which took place on 4 May 1471 and was one of the decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses. Tewkesbury Abbey, which was built in the 12th Century, was unsuccessfully used as a sanctuary by some of the defeated Lancastrians following the battle but the victorious Yorkists, led by Edward IV (Jon's 17 x great uncle), forced their way into the abbey and the subsequent bloodshed caused the building to be closed for a month until it could be purified and re-consecrated.

Originally part of a monastery, the Abbey was saved from Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries after being bought by the townspeople for the price of the lead on the roof to use for their parish church.

It's not just Jon who has a connection with Tewkesbury Abbey, on the shelves of the secondhand bookshop inside I spotted former England cricket captain, Mike Brearley's autobiography (my Dad's cousin!)

The houses and shops throughout the town chart Tewkesbury’s prosperity through a variety of trades. Medieval cottages exist alongside Tudor townhouses and Georgian architecture. Famous for its mustard (Shakespeare’s Falstaff has the line “Wit as thick as Tewkesbury mustard”), other major industries over the years in Tewkesbury include brewing and malting, pin making and the knitting of stockings.

A perfectly preserved Mediaeval townscape, Tewkesbury is home to over 400 listed properties and one of the few places in The Cotswolds where you can see black and white half-timbered buildings.

Tewkesbury holds an internationally renowned Mediaeval Fayre every July where the Battle of Tewkesbury is reenacted by the local history society. The street banners hanging from the buildings are based on the Mediaeval coats of arms of every person involved in the battle.  

Tewkesbury has a plenthora of charity shops and a handful of antique centres and junk shops, too.

Brendan and Lynn used to have a unit in this one. Jon treated himself to some fantastic vintage vinyl.

The Town Hall hosts regular craft and antiqies fairs. It's a great place for a cup of tea, too.

Over the River Avon, close to the former flour mill, King John's Bridge has its origins in the late 12th century. Another of the town’s entrances over the River Severn is the Mythe Bridge designed by Thomas Telford. A cast-iron structure with a 170-foot span, the bridge opened to traffic in 1826.

Taking a breather between charity shops! 

You have to love a town with a cat sculpture.

I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that there's a Wetherspoons in Tewkesbury. The Royal Hop Pole on Church Street is an amalgamation of a number of historic buildings dating between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and even got mentioned in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. We ate pizza in the shady courtyard overlooking the River Severn, possibly one of Spoons' prettiest beer gardens.

 

The tourist information centre is situated in a building built in 1694. The beadle's hat suspended from the first floor is a leftover from when the building was used as a hat shop.

Cornell Books, a family run business with 30,000 antiquarian and secondhand books, is housed within the former Wheatsheaf pub. The proprietor told me that one of her customers had recently done some research and discovered that the oak beams dated to 1425!

 

It's an incredible place and the paperbacks are great value. 

We loved this shop even more when we spotted the resident cat.

We visited every charity shop in Tewkesbury (I lost count at 10) but were very restrained, only buying a 1960s cobalt blue Welsh Wool tapestry trilby and a 1950s Dunn & Co. feather-trimmed fedora - both of which are destined for the next festival. Here's our vinyl haul (from the antiques centre and one of the charity shops)....Revolution by Theatre of Hate (1983), a first pressing of Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (1977) which, unlike our other copy, has the much sought-after textured sleeve, Plastic Bertrand's 1977 album An 1 (I've still got the 7" single, Ca Plane Pour Moi, which I bought from Woolworths the same year!), Sex (I'm a...) Pleasure Victim by Berlin (1982) and a 12" of Careless Whisper by George Michael (1984) - I still have my original 7", bought when I was in the 6th form! 

Thanks to Lynn and Brendan for a bostin' day out. 

If you've not been to Tewkesbury you really should, you can even stay at Wetherspoons !

It's Jon's birthday tomorrow. I'll report back with what we got up to before the end of the week.