Places:

Other Places I Visited in 2024

Friday, 24 January 2025
My 2024 travels featured walking in Australia (The Three Capes Track in Tasmania) and England (The Thames Path). My English travels also took me to that very popular tourist county of Cornwall. Before arriving in England I visited three interesting African countries:  Kenya, South Sudan and Nigeria. In Europe my travels included Albania, the Cote d’Azur in the south of France and Malaga in Spain.   Travelling In India I started with New Delhi and Jaipur then went up to the Mussoorie, Rishikesh and Haridwar hill stations. Then I did a USA road trip across Missouri between Kansas City and St Louis before continuing on to Charleston in South Carolina.
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▲ Glory of St Ignatius Fresco in the Chiesa de Sant’Ignazio di Loyola

I was in Rome for a Gaze on the Future (Sguardi sul futuro) conference for Lonely Planet’s Italian partners EDT and paid more than one visit to the magnificent church on the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio where we also dined until all hours in the Ristorante da Sabatino. Yes that ceiling fresco is utterly astonishing, but it wasn’t until later that I discovered it has also become one of Europe’s top Instagram attractions. It didn’t feel too crowded with social media enthusiasts when I was admiring it.
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▲ An original Fiat 500 (a ‘cinquecento’) and the Pantheon, how much of Rome can you squeeze in to one picture? I’d just had a beer with Angelo Pittro of EDT in a café from where we could gaze across to the Pantheon and I was thinking could anything be more perfect than summer in Rome?
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Way back in the 1960s (yes, I am very old) I studies engineering at Warwick University in Coventry and in after Zurich and before Rome I went back to the university to launch the Wheeler History of Travel Writing programme. Now there’s lots of interest around Coventry – Warwick, Stratford-upon-Avon, Leamington Spa – and lots of interest in Coventry itself, including the terrific Coventry Transport Museum. After all Coventry was not just England’s Motor City, earlier on it was also England’s pioneering bicycle centre.  But the windswept Coventry town centre? When we did the first Lonely Planet Britain guidebook I wrote up Coventry and said something about ‘poor Coventry, blitzed by the Luftwaffe in WW II and then blitzed again by British town planners.’ On my 2024 visit, 30 years had brought no improvement in Lower Precinct, it was still windswept, empty, miserable.
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◄  On 14 November 1940 the Germans really did blitz Coventry and the 14th century Coventry Cathedral was destroyed, today the ruins are linked to the modern St Michael’s Cathedral, designed by architect Basil Spence with this Jacob Epstein sculpture of the Archangel Michael subduing the devil beside the entrance. On 6 May 1967 I was in the cathedral when sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar performed there. On You Tube you can find a recording of Ravi Shankar performing at the Monterey Pop Festival one month later in June 1967, a gathering that also featured Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding
▲ Lady Godiva still rides through the centre with Tennyson’s line on the plinth of her nude-horseback statue: ‘Then she rode back clothed on with chastity she took the tax away and built herself an everlasting name.’ The good lady died sometime between 1066 and 1086, but whether she actually did ride naked, screened only by her long hair, in a successful attempt to convince her husband to relieve his punishing taxation is an open question, but it has certainly inspired any number of paintings and sculptures. She also rides hourly at the Godiva Clock in Coventry and history most famous voyeur, Peeping Tom, gazes out at her. Legendarily he was struck blind – or even dead – for ignoring the instruction not to look out as the lady rode by.
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▲  A visit to Zurich in Switzerland also featured in my European travels. I went to the Zurich Opernhaus for Die Walküre, part two of Richard Wagner’s four opera Ring Cycle. Maureen was there for the whole cycle, of course, I just joined her for the one opera.
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▲ The weather was thoroughly miserable for my whole stay in Zurich, the Ganymede Statue on the lakeside is a symbol of the city. As are the Lake Zurich ferries, but blue skies and snow-capped alpine peaks in the background would have been much better than the uniformly cloudy, grey skies Zurich provided for my visit.
▲ So it was head indoors, where we discovered the art of Kiki Kogelnik – like this one, Spider Visit – in the Zurich Kunsthaus, the city’s excellent art museum. We also sheltered indoors in the Grossmünster church where we admired the stained glass windows, including by Swiss artist Augusto Giacometti from 1932. I climbed the south tower, the Karlsturm, although they’re pretty much a Zurich icon Wagner compared the towers to pepper shakers. From that church we crossed the Limmat, the river which divides Zurich, to the Fraumünster for more stained glass attraction is five windows by Marc Chagall, He created then in 1970 when he was over 80 years old and then followed up with the Rose Window when he was 90. The church also has another Giacometti window.
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▲ A highlight of the time I spent in London in 2024 was dinner at Temple Bar in the City of London. Temple Bar was one of the traditional gateway entrances to the City of London. There were assorted earlier gates before Christopher Wren’s beautiful gate was built in 1669-1672, this was after the Great Fire of London in 1666, although in fact the gate at the time survived the fire. The other seven gateways into the City were all demolished in the 1760s because they caused so much interference to traffic. So did Temple Bar, a problem which got worse as the gate deteriorated and needed to be propped up. Finally in 1878 the gate was removed rather rapidly – it took just 11 days – but put into storage. Just two years later it was reassembled as a gateway into the Theobalds Park estate in Hertforshire of brewery magnate Henry Meux and, more importantly, his wife Varerie Susan Meux.
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It stood there until 2003 when it was disassembled again and in 2004 rebuilt at its current location as a gateway into Paternoster Square, right across from Wren’s magnificent St Paul’s Cathedral. That’s a very short distance from its original location where The Strand turns into Fleet St. It is now the official home of the livery company, the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects. In 2019 I did the speech when Barry Munday took up the role of Master for the Company. The Company can use the room above the gate for dinners and that’s how I ended up having a terrific dinner in what is clearly a pretty amazingly historic place. Fortunately there were no heads of traitors impaled on spikes just above us as we dined.
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Private gardens are a London oddity, there are a huge number of these private squares where the only people allowed to use them live in houses around the square and have a key to get in. One weekend a year – in 2025 that will be 7 and 8 June – 100-plus of these usually-shut-away gardens open the gates for visitors. Go online to London Parks & Gardens to buy a £26.40 ticket for that once a year London Open Gardens opportunity. One of the best know of these private gardens is Rosmead Garden in W11 where the Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant characters in the 1999 film Notting Hill (yes that’s where it is) enjoyed one of their most important encounters.
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◄ Only a few steps from Earls Court Tube Station is Nevern Square where not only is the garden only open to key holders it’s also only open to approved dogs. At the garden entry gates ID photographs are posted of the acceptable hounds. Presumably one day soon surveillance cameras will be linked to AI and the gates will slam shut if the wrong dog tries to sneak in..
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Blue Plaques are a London feature and you can download an app to find them. Most of them note that ‘somebody notable’ lived here and some notables seem to have seeded plaques all around London. I did a Sunday bicycle ride around George Orwell’s London which featured a number of Orwell plaques, he kept on running out of money and had to move to less expensive digs.
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◄  In October 2024 a very official looking ‘blue plaque’ appeared on the front of the Tesco Supermarket in Walthamstow where the lettuce which outlasted England shortest term prime minister Liz Truss was purchased. Unfortunately spoil sport Tesco soon took it down, but it was nice to have ‘good news,’ if only briefly.
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◄ Maureen’s from Belfast and we made a trip there from London for the wedding of her nephew. And caught an opera – Eugene Onegin – in the magnificent Belfast Grand Opera House. Before taking our seats we had drinks in the top floor bar of The Observatory with views down on the Belfast Town Hall and across the city to Cave Hill and the Samson and Goliath shipbuilding cranes at Harland & Wolff, on the top right side of the picture – the company has just gone bankrupt.
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◄ Graffiti and wall art has had such a political perspective – Republican or Unionist – for so long in Belfast it’s a pleasure to find street art shifting to a non-political focus. Like this mural in the Linen Quarter of the city centre.
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▲ Meanwhile back in Melbourne, another city that loves its street art, this one is on the side of the old Dimmeys building in the inner city suburb of Richmond.
▲ Cross the river to South Yarra and these Sikhs cruised by down Chapel St in their Jeep one evening. No doubt they’re breaking the law in nanny-state-Australia, driving around without a seat belt on, but they looked great.