Is it from what others tell you about it or what you have experienced by being there or perhaps it's what you have read about it in books and magazines?
For me it's often first impressions. I probably decide whether I'm going to like a place within five minutes of being there which is a totally wrong thing to do but I know many others feel the same way.
Circumstances also play a large part as well. They can skew your thoughts about a place. Take the small island of Korcula which when we holidayed there was in Yugoslavia but which today is in Croatia.
If we had visited it as a couple we would have admired the medieval architecture, the narrow streets, the history of the place and its uncertainty due to the imminent break up of the country. But we had two young sons with us on that trip and my first thought was "what on earth are they going to find to do for two weeks (or it might just have been one) here." Luckily they made friends and seemed ok and it was only a short ferry boat ride to the mainland and so we went on a few coach trips.
Warning - don't read the next bit of you are about to have your breakfast.
One day we crossed the sea and got on a coach. There were other children on the trip. Two of them at the back felt sick and threw up on the floor which started what can only be referred to as a vomit relay with others being sick as well. The coach driver wasn't amused. Bet he wished he had a coach full of pensioners.
Often we go to places that we have read about, often we go to places just because they are there and sometimes we go because they are part of a tour, trip or cruise.
There's a world of difference between staying in a place for a week and just visiting for a few hours. Sometimes we have four or five hours in a place and wish we had longer and sometimes have days somewhere and wish we only had hours.
A prime example of having too long was going on a so called romantic Valentine's mystery trip. I'm sure I've mentioned this before so won't repeat myself except to say we were dumped in the middle of Leeds on a Sunday morning before the shops opened and had seven hours there. I think you probably get my point that seven hours was about six and a half too long.
Palermo. Now there's a place. Dead cats in the street, crumbling buildings. Thankfully we were only there for a few hours. I know people who like Palermo but I rate it one of the worst places we have visited.
Stayed overnight in Banff in Canada and could happily have spent a week there. But back to my initial question about criteria. So many places mean so many different things to me. When I'm travelling in this country I always look for whether a place has what I call a community heart. You soon get a feeling for this. Dunblane, which we visited years ago, had a wonderful community heart and I'm sure it didn't just come from the awful events of the school massacre.
We are off on our travels again in a few days time - this time to Shropshire an area we visited a couple of years ago. Was it before or after lockdown? The mind plays tricks with time. It's easy to dip in and out of Wales. Fell in love with Ludlow with its history, its beauty and its street market. Didn't feel the same way about Shrewsbury though. Liked Worcester and Much Wenlock and so am looking forward to revisiting them. I will bring you photos as we go.
Norwich - now there's a place to visit but preferably not at night. I hate saying this about my home city but it isn't very pleasant after dark. During the day it's full of colour and history and a lovely place to be. At night I find it a touch intimidating and unpleasant and I know others share my views.
So how did my question arise? Well a few days ago I took a book out of the library entitled "Building Britannia - A history of Britain in Twenty Five Buildings" by Steven Parissien. I usually give this kind of book a wide berth. I don't like the concept of history through a number of objects etc. I'm sure it's a good way of getting knowledge but not usually for me.
I was attracted to this book by two of the later entries which surprised me. The first was about the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill in Sussex and the second about 20 Forthlin Road in Liverpool. Both play a very tenuous part in our life and travels and the first illustrates my thoughts on how you decide what a place is like.
To all intent and purposes The De La Warr (which I found out was pronounced as in the American state of Delaware and not as in de la war as I had always referred to it) looks like a very modern building and I guess it is in architectural terms. It was built in 1935. It overlooks the sea and was the second major modernist building to be built on Britain, only being preceded apparently by Hornsey Town Hall.
It was built following an architectural competition which was won by Erich Mendelssohn and Serge Chermayeff who you will detect aren't British. So it was deemed to be in the modernist and international style. Some people didn't like the fact that the competition was won by Johnny Foreigners.
The competition was initiated by Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr after whom the building was named.
During the Second World War it was used by the military as it gave a good vantage point looking across the English Channel. Spike Milligan was stationed at the pavilion.
German bombers destroyed the Metropole Hotel which was adjacent to the pavilion but the De La Warr only suffered minor damage.
Gradually the pavilion lost it's gloss after the war and fell onto disrepair, being used at one stage for indoor car boot sales.
Thankfully it sprung back to life after being granted Grade One listed building status in 1986. In 2002 it was granted £6 million by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council and was turned into a contemporary arts centre, also attracting top level artists from the world of stage and music.
So why am I going on about the De La Warr? Well we have had coffee there but it does fit in with my question about the way we look at places. To us Bexhill is a picturesque quiet seaside resort close to Hastings, a pleasant place for a short sojourn. It has a very pleasant prom and seems to have recovered from the ravages suffered by seaside resorts in general after their heyday in the fifties and sixties.
I like Bexhill and I like the De La Warr both from an architectural point of view and as an arts venue. Our eldest son works in Bexhill and has a slightly different view of the place. He views it from a very different angle to us.
As for 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool. Well that's a very ordinary looking council house in a road of very ordinary looking council houses. So why is it in the book apart from the fact that it symbolises the change in post war housing in Liverpool? Put simply it was the home of a mum who was a midwife, a dad who for a time had his own jazz band and two boys who would both become famous - one for all time and one for a relatively short while. Both boys would be better known by their second Christian names. One was James Paul and the other Peter Michael.
Ok enough clues. You've probably worked it out anyway. The family name was McCartney. One boy became a Beatle and the other was led to The Scaffold without being in fear of being executed. He's also a pretty good photographer.
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Yesterday got a bit scary. No the other four-fifths didn't turn into a werewolf or anything like that. I decided to look at the feasibility of doing a podcast audio version of my blog. So I sat down with my mobile phone and a cup of coffee and activated my voice recorder and started reading my blogs for the week from last Monday until yesterday morning. That's seven blogs in total.
It seemed to go on for some time and when I checked the time out after finishing, it came out at over 40 minutes. Yes that is ever so slightly frightening.
Question is, would anyone be interested in listening to my anything but dulcet tones as a podcast when you can all read the dribblings on Facebook? Do let me know. I will endeavour to put this on as an audio file safely aware that it could all go a bit Pete Tong.
I had a look back at some old blogs and realised that I missed a recent birthday. March 18th marked four years of my daily blogs. I did do a few before that date but it was four years ago that I really started and haven't started since. In the early days I sometimes wrote two or three a day. So by my reckoning I'm somewhere around the 1500 blogs mark.
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