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Few years back, BBC History Magazine had an article on the Jacobean space programme. One of those articles where the title’s slightly better than the read (something you could never accuse this blog of), it concerned a seventeenth century gent who wanted to open trade routes to the moon, and designed a machine to get there.
The machine didn’t work. ‘Zounds, can’t understand it. I mean, it’s hardly rocket science, is it?’ ‘Wot’s “rocket science”?’
Better still, ‘Jacobean Space Programme’ is clearly the prog rock band that never quite happened. Everyone in the band with pointy beards. Lots of frilly shirt cuffs and long harpischord solos. The lead singer insists on signing autographs with a quill. People in the audience playing Air Lute. Jokey ‘B’side ‘You Never Look Tough When You’re Wearing A Ruff’ roundly hated by the fan club.
Jacobean Space Programme: for everyone who can’t be arsed to start a band, and is perfectly happy just making up the name.
Next month: we review difficult second albums from The Zippy Tortoises, Stalin Henderson, Cumberland Rat Station and The Flat Earth Surfers.
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Snuffing Out Ghost Trains at Spencer Road Halt
Just inside the less obvious entrance to Victoria station is a map of the Southern Railways network which I would guess was painted onto the tiles in the twenties. It’s a handsome piece of work, and includes a number of long-dead stations local to The World of Quark such as Selsdon, the outline of which can still be glimpsed from Sanderstead trains, and Bingham Road Halt, where Tony Hancock filmed a scene for ‘The Rebel’.
More bewilderingly, it also mentions a mythical beast called ‘Spencer Road Halt’. This rather marvellous website reveals Spencer Road to have been only fleetingly in use, between 1906 and 1915; but rather than being pulled down, it seems to have been left to rot – and can still be found, just about, between two streets of houses, one of which is Birdhurst Rise, best known for a series of notorious murders a decade or so after Spencer Road Halt closed.
A footpath links Birdhurst Rise and the eponymous Spencer Road. Weaving behind houses, flats and a Scout hut, you suddenly come across a large metal bridge which looms improbably up at you, as if someone’s left it there by mistake. It’s impossible to tell it was a bridge over a railway track – nowadays, it overlooks a long stream of large trees, which have dramatically reclaimed the area.
Endearingly, someone at Southern Railways has taken the instruction ‘Catalogue everything we own, Nigel’ to an extreme and even though Spencer Halt is now just an inappropriate bridge glub-glub-glubbing under waves of foliage, the bridge still has an official number and the edge of each step has been carefully painted yellow, so that very lost people, the phantoms of commuters and Scoutmasters don’t come a cropper. Thoughtfully, someone has even dumped some bags of rubbish to give that authentic ‘old station’ feel.
And then out onto Spencer Road, with a slight feeling of: ‘Did that really happen…?’
More bewilderingly, it also mentions a mythical beast called ‘Spencer Road Halt’. This rather marvellous website reveals Spencer Road to have been only fleetingly in use, between 1906 and 1915; but rather than being pulled down, it seems to have been left to rot – and can still be found, just about, between two streets of houses, one of which is Birdhurst Rise, best known for a series of notorious murders a decade or so after Spencer Road Halt closed.
A footpath links Birdhurst Rise and the eponymous Spencer Road. Weaving behind houses, flats and a Scout hut, you suddenly come across a large metal bridge which looms improbably up at you, as if someone’s left it there by mistake. It’s impossible to tell it was a bridge over a railway track – nowadays, it overlooks a long stream of large trees, which have dramatically reclaimed the area.
Endearingly, someone at Southern Railways has taken the instruction ‘Catalogue everything we own, Nigel’ to an extreme and even though Spencer Halt is now just an inappropriate bridge glub-glub-glubbing under waves of foliage, the bridge still has an official number and the edge of each step has been carefully painted yellow, so that very lost people, the phantoms of commuters and Scoutmasters don’t come a cropper. Thoughtfully, someone has even dumped some bags of rubbish to give that authentic ‘old station’ feel.
And then out onto Spencer Road, with a slight feeling of: ‘Did that really happen…?’
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