We were back in Sunderland in April and I took the opportunity to get some better photos of the Art Deco buildings I featured here and here in 2021.

Wilko’s:-

Marks & Spencer:-

Old Woolworths:-

Former Woolworths building Sunderland:-

Detail:-

Full frontage. Stitched photo. The curve is an artifact:-

Marks and Spencer. Horizontals, verticals:-

Frontage. Stitch of two photos. The curvature is an illusion:-

The Marks and Spencer in Rochdale is a typical 1930s building:-

Roofline:-

Window detail:-

Reverse view from first. Note Lloyd’s Bank to the left:-

Yesterday I had to travel about Fife and the Edinburgh area.

In St Andrews I spotted British Legion poppies (the small ones made of metal; presumably manufactured for those who think that the normal paper ones do not sufficiently show off their “patriotism” or generosity – but I call it their ostentation) at a checkout in the “M&S Food” there.

Later in a supermarket in North Queensferry, on the way home from a dinner at my eldest son’s, just inside the door was a stack of tins (well, nowadays they’re “plastics”) of Roses, Quality Street, Celebrations and Heroes.

Christmas has long since started in August – that was always when annuals were published – but Remembrance Day? They’re still beating the drums at the Edinburgh Tattoo for goodness’s sake.

We made one of our trips down south in August and had a look at Wigan as our nearly daughter-in-law (the wedding will be in July) had had to break a train journey there and said she found it nice. It is.

Specsavers:-

Marks & Spencer’s (stitch of two photos):-

Game:-

A former cinema now a nightclub called Pure:-

Pure’s side alley:-

A newsagent’s (good stained glass windows):-

A clock tower, from a distance:-

Apart from the Beresford Hotel, Sauchiehall Street had a couple of other Art Deco buildings. This is a stitch of Marks and Spencer’s:-

And here is a close-up showing some detail:-

Dunnes Stores is on the corner of Sauchiehall and Cambridge Streets:-

Roof-line and window detail:-

There is a lovely finish to the highest part:-

The ABC cinema predates deco – originally built in 1877 before conversion to a cinema in 1929 – but is still a fine building. (Two photos stitched to get it all in):-

The Scottish cinemas website says it is closed. It seems to house a music venue now.

On the way back to Scotland we stopped off at Stafford for a break.

The place is festooned with Art Deco.

This is the Edinburgh Woollen Mill:-

And here’s a detail:-

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This is the upper frontage of the Nat West Building:-

This is the upper frontage of the Nat West Building:-

This is another shop’s frontage:-

Here’s Marks and Spencer’s (a stitch of two photos):-

Art Deco, or at least 1930s, style shop upper window. The glazing looks original to me. Possibly Critall. Good brickwork too.

A pub/restaurant called Casa. Perhaps modern but has deco style

Harper Collins, 1996, 390p.

This collection of short fiction by my favourite writer of Science Fiction (of fiction full stop) comprises 18 stories first published in the pages of, among others, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ms., Playboy and Omni, plus some otherwise uncredited. They range in length from 3 to 37 pages. I read quite a few of these on a trip away but was not taking notes and so have not commented in depth. Despite the mainly non-genre organs where they first appeared all have an air of otherness about them, of things not quite explicable.

The most Science-Fictional, Ether, OR, appeared in Asimov’s. It is narrated sequentially by the various inhabitants of a town that can shift its location.

The title story, Unlocking the Air, is one of Le Guin’s Orsinian Tales and relates the story of a revolution in that fantasy middle European country. Daddy’s Big Girl is a near fairy tale about a girl who keeps growing. The Poacher takes as its subject matter a well-known fairy tale but approaches it, in characteristic Le Guin fashion, at a considerable tangent.

Le Guin’s typical compassion and sympathy for her characters are evident throughout.

Newcastle’s Northumberland Street does still have a couple of deco frontages. This is a Peacock’s now. Was it once a Woolies? Again the photo is a stitch.

I had thought this one might have been a Burton’s:-

I think now, due to the clock, it was once a Marks and Spencer but it may have been something else. In any case I searched flickr and the picture below is what came up for Burton’s. It looked like one of the art deco buildings I had seen in the book of old Newcastle (see first link in this post):-

I saw no sign of this building on present day Northumberland Street. The Marks and Spencer’s shop is now located in the Eldon Square shopping centre. We went in and browsed but there was nothing worth buying.

The photograph below (from flickr via a postcard) was exactly the same as the other art deco building I had seen in the book of old Newcastle:-

I did notice a newer Bhs further along Northumberland Street. The building in the postcard was apparently demolished to make Monument Mall. I doubt that’s as aesthetically pleasing as the former Bhs was.

Right at the end of Northumberland Street we came upon this very tall monument.

It was erected in memory of the dead of the “South African War” as the inscription has it. This is more often known as the Boer War but more accurately was the Second Boer War.

There are quite a few such memorials around. One is on the parapet of Edinburgh’s North Bridge. I have a piece of crested china which is a reproduction of the memorial in Hull to the dead of the same war and I have seen another similarly patterned piece with a different town’s crest. The next day (in Durham) we encountered another tall memorial to the South African War.

On the way back to the car we passed Newcastle’s civic centre. It’s a much more modern building with a tower surmounted by a circular top with horses’ heads and a finial showing the three castle symbol that also appears on silver objects assayed in Newcastle when the city still had an assay office.

The castle motif also appeared on the railings surrounding the civic centre.

*Edited to add:- for some idea of the memorial’s scale see this link. Its surroundings have changed somewhat since the postcard photos in the link were taken.