A Son of the Rock

I was watching Country Tracks on BBC 1 this morning – well it was on and I was in the same room.

They were doing what might as well have been an episode of Coast; from Liverpool to Morecambe – with a diversion up the Manchester Ship Canal – taking in along the way Antony Gormley‘s statues on Crosby Beach, and Blackpool.

A lot of the programme consisted of clips shown on previous BBC shows. The introduction to Morecambe was an extract from a 2006 edition of Coast which I remember well as it alerted me to the refurbishment of the Midland Hotel which I looked at last year and Big Rab has photographed recently.

The show is on the BBC iPlayer. For how long I don’t know. (The content wasn’t working when I tried though. The relevant bit will be towards the end.) For a programme called Country Tracks it spent a lot of time in cities and towns this week.

The presenter got to stay the night in the hotel and we saw several shots of the inside and the Eric Gill artworks.

By a curious coincidence yesterday’s Guardian Review (I only get round to reading that bit on a Sunday) had an article about another English sea-side Art Deco extravagance, Marine Court, St Leonards, whose structure is modelled on the liner RMS Queen Mary. Marine Court opened just in time to be made a bit of a white elephant by the Second World War. It’s quite stunning.