The Back Of Moor House
I think this building with the distinctive windows is Moor House.
The Back Of Moor House
It does remind me of Oriel Chambers in Liverpool.
Oriel Chambers
But that building was completed in 1864 or 140 years before Moor House.
Told Off For Not Buying A Cheap Ticket
I came back from Liverpool to Birmingham by London Midland. I didn’t have much time to get a ticket at Lime Street, especially as the one machine near my platform was broken. I was told that I could get a ticket on the train, which in fact I did.
The inspector said, I should have bought it on-line before I left, as that way I’d have got it for a fiver. I can’t remember what I paid, but I did get a normal Off Peak.
My trouble though had been that I might have stayed later in Liverpool and gone straight back to London missing the football in Birmingham.
I suspect that London Midland have been getting complaints about overpriced tickets and they’re trying to do something.
Wouldn’t it be much simpler, if we had some sort of electronic system, that worked out your cheapest ticket.
A few more ticket machines at Lime Street would have helped too!
Walking Down To Lime Street
This picture brings back two memories.
Walking Down To Lime Street
In 1965, when I arrived in Liverpool for the first time to start my studies, I remember lugging my cardboard suitcase up this same hill to get a Crosville H13 bus or something like it, to my digs in Huyton. Students don’t arrive like that in universities today. They’re probably taken in style by car for a start. I think C too, had to find her own way to her place in Dale Hall.
Also shown in this picture is the old Trust House Forte, St. George’s Hotel, where we spent the weekend of April 6th, 1974. How can I be so sure of the date? It was the day that Abba won the European song contest with Waterloo. I can’t remember much else about that weekend. I don’t even know, whether the children came with us or how we travelled to the city. I can remember being served some of the worst scrambled eggs of my life and the look of disgust on what his staff had produced on the restaurant manager’s face, as he wrung the whey out of them with his hand.
I have discussed this story of the scrambled egg with my son and he said he was there. We did go to the Grand National in either 1978 or 1979, but then we went afterwards to the Lake District. It couldn’t have been 1974 as Red Rum won that year on the 30th March. So as the memory of Abba is I believe right, that puts us there a week later.
The streets of Liverpool are paved with memories. Sadly, all the pictures from the time have been lost.
Would You Live In A Church?
The Church of St. Andrew in Rodney Street in Liverpool has been a ruin for years.
Would You Live In A Church?
But now it’s being converted into a hundred student rooms. For a city with a deep religious feeling, it does seem to be very happy to use old churches for secular purposes. Many of my university exams were taken in redundant ones.
I do like this piece from Wikipedia about the church.
Adjacent to the church in the churchyard is a monument to William Mackenzie, a railway contractor who died in 1851. It is in the shape of a pyramid, is constructed in granite, and was erected in 1868. Facing the street is a blind entrance flanked by uprights supporting a lintel containing a bronze plaque. The structure is a Grade II listed building.
There is a tradition that, as Mackenzie was a gambling man, he sold his soul to the Devil, and that his body was placed in a seating position above ground within the pyramid, in order that the Devil may not claim him. His ghost is said to haunt Rodney Street.
So will Mackenzie be surprising students in their beds?
Gates To A Palace?
Are these the gates to a palace? Or as they are in Liverpool, perhaps they’re the gates to a bishop or archbishop’s residence.
Gates To A Palace?
But no! They’re the gates to a pub. But it is the Philharmonic Dining Rooms.
A Liverpool Facelift
You’d think it would be something like an Essex facelift, which appears in Wikipedia as a Croydon facelift. Although, I’ve never heard of it with respect to Croydon.
A Liverpool Facelift
But as the picture shows, it’s not that at all!
The Hope Street Hotel
On Friday night, I went to Liverpool for an Alumni Dinner at the University and stayed in the Hope Street Hotel,where the dinner was held. Here’s a few pictures.
One of the reasons, I like the hotel is that it does gluten-free food superbly well. It did in the dinner on Friday night and the food was summed up by the superb smoked haddock and poached eggs that I had for breakfast.
Other hotels should take note about the breakfast as fish and eggs is so simple and also impossible to add gluten.
When Was It Known Hillsborough Had No Safety Certificate?
It has been said many times in the last day or so, that Hillsborough had no safety certificate, at the time of the disaster on April 15th, 1989.
Perhaps, my memory has gone, but although I can remember the disaster, I can’t associate it with what I was doing at the time. I wouldn’t have been at football at Ipswich, as at that time I didn’t go. I can remember where I was when I heard about Lockerbie a few months earlier.
So for how long has it been known that Hillsborough did not have a valid safety certificate at the time of the disaster?
Surely to knowingly book the stadium without a valid safety certificate, is akin to flying a Boeing 747, without a valid certificate of airworthiness.
Or was that something that always happened in those days?
In trying to get more answers to my question, I came across this page on the web site of the Football Industry Group at Liverpool University. It is something everybody should read. This is one of the page’s conclusions.
The disaster was basically caused by the failure of South Yorkshire Police to control a large
crowd of Liverpool fans outside the Leppings Lane End, and the poor state of the ground,
but it was also clear that football’s total failure to learn from the numerous disasters that had
afflicted it during the twentieth century, and a police force conditioned to view supporters as
potential hooligans and so always expecting violence, contributed significantly to the 96 deaths
and many hundreds of injuries.
I agree very much about learning from the past. In the 1960s, I was in a few crushes at White Hart Lane and Highbury, and how they avoided a Hillsborough-type disaster in some matches, was more down to luck than any planning.
The page also says this about the safety certificate and emergency plans.
Sheffield Wednesday had redeveloped parts of the ground without obtaining
a new safety certificate, or telling the emergency services: the result was that the safety certificate was
outdated and useless, and that plans Sheffield Wednesday had developed with the local emergency
services could not be put into practice, as the layout of the ground had changed.
That to me is inadequate, to say the very least. An emergency plan like that, only works without an emergency.
The Catholic Cathedral That Wasn’t
I went over the new Liverpool Museum and they had the model there of Lutyens design for the Catholic Cathedral that was never built.
The Catholic Cathedral That Wasn’t
I’ve seen it some time before. But where or when I do not know. Perhaps it was shown, when they were building the present cathedral. I was in Liverpool at that time.
The Superlambanana With Bling
This superlambanana was outside a jewellers.
The Superlambanana With Bling
Although they are really leftovers from the European Capital of Culture in 2008, you still see them in odd places around the city.
The Anonymous Widower 