orwellianTwo

de Riga

August 3, 2026

As the sign says, the city of Riga was celebrating its 825th anniversary when I turned up. That’s 825 years since the papal emissary Bishop Albert of Bremen forced the local Livonian people to accept a bishopric here and turn to Christianity. So not quite your quaint old town charter with fancy seals, then. There would be a lot more forcing going on here over the centuries.

The pagan, Finnic-speaking Livonians would over time be supplanted by Indo-European-speaking Latvians. But that was only to win the dubious second prize of “being underlings to the Baltic Germans”. In Bishop Albert’s wake, generations of Germans would arrive and set up a good living exporting timber down the Daugava river. It was the Germans who would build the Old Town and its many fine houses and cathedrals.

The famous Old Town of Riga, then, was essentially a German town, more connected to other Hanseatic ports such as Lübeck than to the rest of what became Latvia. And its Germans were prosperous, merchant types, finding faith in their Lutheranism and companionship in the various guilds of the city.

Before a young German man of good standing could find himself in a proper guild, there had to be a way he could connect up with other young men on the same pathway. And this is where Riga’s most famous – and curious – landmark, the House of the Blackheads, came in.

Erected in 1334, the House of the Blackheads was the opulent home of the Brotherhood of the Blackheads, a guild for bachelor merchants who would work here and meet here. There were strict rules on behaviour to prevent it turning into a medieval frat party, and to be honest, the religious convictions of the members would have been a moderating factor anyway.

The Blackheads took their name from St Maurice (or St Moritz if you like your skiing). St Maurice was a Roman legionnaire officer who refused the order to slaughter as many Christians as his unit could get their hands on. That was partly because he was one of them. This hacked off the Romans so much that they hacked off his head and that of the rest of his men. It’s likely the Blackheads identified with a devout Christian in a pagan Roman empire doing the right thing by the true faith, seeing they were a Christian community amongst a sea of recently-pagan Balts.

St Maurice, legend has it, was an Egyptian and he is traditionally depicted as an African. The House of the Blackheads is full of shiny carved and painted black heads, they’re all over the place amongst the ornate panelling, the fine painting, the splendid collection of silver. Some of the depictions of St Maurice show his honourable nobility, other, ahem, less so. Obviously they went for authenticity against Nineties sensitivity when they built the House of the Blackheads in 1999.

Yes. They built this in 1999. There had been a House of the Blackheads here for centuries, and you can see it in the old photographs. The Brotherhood had kept going, mainly as a ceremonial thing, and the House hosted concerts by famous musicians and the like (Richard Wagner stayed here for a bit). The Brotherhood only moved out when the Baltic Germans left for occupied Poland and Germany when Stalin was granted the Baltic states in 1940. The House wasn’t so lucky. The Germans invaded in 1941, and it was destroyed in the fighting. After the war, the occupying Soviets ignored the feelings of the locals and just blew up the ruins in 1948.

Building on earlier assiduous research, the building was rebuilt in the 1990s once Latvia gained its independence. The old photos helped with the facade, but the Brotherhood were a private lot and hadn’t allowed too much photography inside their lovely interior. So if you do visit, remember what you’re seeing is not even a restoration, it’s a reimagining based on historical judgement. Today the House is used for many ceremonies and official occasions, even taking over as the presidential office when the castle was being renovated in the 2010s. Nice place, regardless of the authenticity.

So given the context, the more apposite juxtaposition you’re looking for isn’t the way the House of the Blackheads is presented in the official tourist photographs. It’s this one. That rather ominous slab of black is in fact the sobering Museum of the Occupation of Latvia.

Riga had been occupied before, notably by the Swedes and the Russian Tzars, and Latvia would only emerge as an independent nation after the First World War. Twenty years of democracy, democratic chaos, and autocracy followed until in 1940, Stalin took up his side of the bargain that was the Hitler-Stalin pact and annexed all three Baltic states. The repression, deportations and executions that followed left many Latvians greeting the German armies as liberators when Hitler tore up the contract in 1941. “Liberation” of course meant liberating the Latvians from their freedom and the Jewish and Roma communities from the bothersome business of existence. Back came the Soviets in 1945, and Stalin’s brutality continued. Adding up the deaths, the purges, the deportations, the refugee flows, Latvia had lost a third of its population by the end of the war.

The Museum of the Occupation tells the sad story of all three occupations in great, moving detail, the fate of the deported families, the apparatus of repression, how people survived in the gulags – or didn’t.

Try as it might, the Soviets couldn’t crust the Latvian desire for freedom and self-determination, and all the Baltic states won their independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union crumbled. Today Latvia is a fully-operational democracy, looking to the West as a member of NATO and the EU, while nervously looking over its shoulder at Putin’s Russia and its depredations in Ukraine. A few hours in this museum and you will be made fully aware of why the Baltic states are so twitchy.

Back to the quaint stuff.

You can see the famous wooden tower of St Peter’s church from most spots in the Old Town. It’s the thing to do in town to go up to the viewing platform of this venerable old tower and look out over old Riga. The Soviets even put in a lift for you when they built it.

I promise, that was the last time I’ll do that. The fighting in 1941 was concentrated around the banks of the Daugava river, which is why the Blackheads and St Peter’s got smashed. What we see of St Peter’s is mainly reconstruction, and reconstruction of a very-reconstructed church at that. But even if it had been left alone in the war, to me it seemed that the best thing about this rather dour, cold, serious Lutheran church would be the tower.

I didn’t go up the tower by the way, I didn’t realise there was a lift.

Moving away from the Old Town to the east, you come across a ring of lovely parks, and between them, the Freedom Monument.

The Freedom Monument was erected in 1935 to commemorate the Latvians killed in the 1918-1920 War of Independence. As “AI-Me” mentioned in my previous post, this caused a problem for the Soviets after 1945, and required some reinterpretation (see “Directing the Narrative”). But Gemini-Me didn’t cover events beyond 1991. The Freedom Monument still sees regular commemorations of those who struggled for Latvian independence down the decades, and rather unfortunately, about twenty years ago that meant members of the Latvian branch of the Waffen-SS who fought against the Soviets in the Second World War. Which understandably caused a reaction in Moscow. You still see the police keeping watch around the monument, making sure no-one does anything contentious here.

Bear in mind that in 2017 ethnic Latvians made up 44% of Riga’s population. 33% were ethnic Russians, mainly the result of immigration during the Soviet years. The Occupation Museum is rather sniffy about the ethnic Russians, claiming they were brought in to dilute Latvian national identity, and complaining that they haven’t embraced Latvian-ness. This whole area of Latvian – indeed Baltic – life is very sensitive stuff. Expect to hear more about it in the next few years – particularly from the Kremlin.

There were some Russians here before that. Riga’s 19th-century German businessmen saw the way the wind was blowing and went all-in on industrialisation. That required manpower, and in they came – Latvians, Poles, Russians, Jews, making Riga quite the multicultural city. And making the businesspeople lots of money, which they partly spent on turning Riga into one of the world’s great treasuries of Art Nouveau architecture – nowhere more so than on famous Albert Street.

There’s more about it in Fake-Me’s Gargoyles and Heavy Spirits section from the previous post. (I haven’t felt up to trying out the black balsam though.)

Art Nouveau pops up in the rest of the city too…

…and not just in the city. On my last day I took the 30-minute train ride to the resort town of Jūrmala, westwards along the Gulf of Riga. It turned out that Jūrmala is strung out for 20km along the coast and there was a town centre I’d missed. But I saw enough of the delightful early 20th-century resort houses and churches to see what the rich were doing with their money once they’d made it.

Jūrmala was a fine place to spend a sunny day. There is some dark history here about an antisemitic massacre in 1941 when Latvian nationalists burned down a synagogue, but I wanted to end on an upbeat note. A note that acknowledges history but points a way forward. So, refreshed by the sea air, we head back to the city, and St Peter’s.

Links between Riga and Bishop Albert’s old stomping ground of Bremen remain strong, and here we see Bremen’s famous four musicians. According to the Brothers Grimm, four ageing farm animals – a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster – have had enough of the farm and set out on the road to become musicians. At some point they find robbers in their forest home. They’re all too small to fight them off one-by-one, so they decide to make one big animal by standing one each other’s back and howl at them. This does the trick and the robbers flee.

There is an original in Germany so what we have here is a copy by the German artist Krista Baumgärtel and presented to Riga in the interesting year of 1990. Because in the original, the animals are not looking through an iron curtain. Especially not an “Iron Curtain”. And in 1990 Latvia is still the Latvian Soviet republic, but the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Baltic states are sensing an opportunity, peering through the darkness and blinking in the light of a possible future.

There’s something else too. The animals are too small to fight off their oppressors individually, so they decide to make one big animal. And if you read my blog post from Vilnius in 2023, you’ll see that this is what the Baltic nations put into practice to win their freedom, most starkly with their great human chain from Tallinn in Estonia, through Latvia and down to Vilnius in Lithuania.

And it worked. Pulling together, co-operating to face the great challenges of the moment paid off in 1991, and it’s still a model for us all. Riga hasn’t always got it right in its multilayered history but sometimes – the guilds, the Blackheads, the independence movement – it’s shown that we’re stronger together than when we’re on our own. And that’s not a bad point at which to leave this rather fascinating, delightful, bewildering little city.

(Particularly delightful when the beer bikes in the Old Town have passed by and gone.)
Balt from the blue

July 31, 2026

So I did the thing, and I’m just going to have to admit to it now.

It was a very warm day. The heat will do things to you, if you’re not careful. And it was the hot European summer of 2026. Northern Europe wasn’t built for heat. The Old Town of Riga is a narrow cocoon of high-sided Germanic shops and residences, charming and old-time, but constricting and unyielding when the heat builds, although they do offer some shade from the high Latvian summer sun.

And it was a humid sort of heat, down on the banks of the yawning Daugava river through which Riga’s fortune flowed. When the humid air meets the flower beds in the picturesque ring of parks on the Old Town’s north-east edge, there’s a sweet, languid fragrance in the air, a tropical feel that belies the image of a stolid, reserved Baltic city. The bitter northern winter would probably feel very different. But it was summer. And warm. And I was knackered, and there I was in the Old Town, beer in front of me, trying to come up with ideas for my blog.

A set of conditions that might tempt you to cut corners…

So I pressed the button and did the thing. And I was overcome with an intense bout of shame, a shame that burned fiercer than the late July sun.

A shame greater than that of those medieval missionaries who’d failed to bring the pagan peoples of the Gulf of Riga to the true faith of the Holy Roman Empire…

A shame greater than that of the Latvian functionaries of the Soviet era, forced to facilitate the ongoing oppression of their own people and work against their national aspirations…

A shame greater than that of a visiting stag lad when videos of his behaviour in the Old Town started appearing online…

…ok not as shameful as the last one, but it was bad enough. Because I’d decided to cut a corner and come up with a quicker way of blogging. And also get down with the kids, and more importantly our new tech tyrants.

So I did the thing. I opened Google Gemini on my phone, and typed in

“create a blog post about riga in the style of orwelliantwo.com”

And it did – well sort-of. See what you think.

AI-GENERATED

Parallel lines

July 31, 2026 Step out of the monolithic concrete cavern of Riga Central Station and you are immediately confronted by a city that doesn’t just display its history; it layers it like a complex, geological strata. It is a metropolis of stark architectural dualities, where the fragile, swirling whimsy of German Art Nouveau aggressively collides with the heavy, unyielding grey stone of Soviet occupation.

The Daugava River splits the city cleanly in two, a wide ribbon of slate-grey water rolling out toward the Gulf of Riga. It’s a body of water that has brought Riga its immense trading fortunes since the days of the Hanseatic League. But looking across the banks today, it’s hard not to feel that the river is a physical fault line between competing versions of the European century.

The Gothic and the Grey

Start your wandering in the Vecrīga—the old town—where the narrow, cobbled alleyways are so tightly packed that the tour groups seem to bleed into one another. Here stands the massive Riga Cathedral, its dark towering spire defining the skyline. Like its counterparts in Bruges or Zurich, this place was built on the supreme self-confidence of medieval merchants who got very rich, very quickly.

But walk just a few blocks east, and the romantic illusion evaporates. The House of the Blackheads, a beautifully reconstructed Gothic fantasy of Dutch gables and ornate carvings, sits directly opposite the dark, brooding concrete block of the Museum of the Occupation. It is a jarring, brilliant, and deeply uncomfortable juxtaposition.

The original medieval square was completely flattened by German artillery during the Second World War. When the Soviets moved in, they didn’t bother restoring the merchant glitz. Instead, they erected an unyielding monument to the Red Latvian Riflemen. Are we looking at a celebration of revolutionary heroes, or a stone-faced reminder of who owned the town? It depends entirely on which calendar year you choose to look through.

Directing the Narrative

Speaking of monuments that make people nervous, a short walk down Brīvības Bulvāris brings you to the Freedom Monument. At the top, “Milda” stands high and proud, holding her three golden stars to the sky, representing the historical regions of Latvia.

During the Soviet era, the authorities desperately wanted to pull her down or rewrite her story. Propaganda is a funny thing; when you can’t demolish a symbol, you simply change the script. The official narrative was swiftly reverse-engineered: the public was told Milda was actually Mother Russia, and the three stars represented the Baltic republics safely gathered under her protective embrace. Talk about an impressive bit of political doublethink! [1, 2, 3]

The local Rīdzinieki knew better, of course, keeping a quiet, subversive counsel as they walked past under the watchful eyes of the state.

Gargoyles and Heavy Spirits

To clear the head of all that heavy political baggage, take a walk into the Quiet Centre. Riga possesses the highest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture anywhere in the world, largely thanks to Mikhail Eisenstein—father of Sergei, the famous Battleship Potemkin director.

Alberta Iela is an absolute riot of human and animal faces staring down at you from blue-brick facades. Screaming sphinxes, bloated lions, and elongated stone maidens twist out from the stone. It feels like stepping into a manic, turn-of-the-century dreamscape. It’s gorgeous, but like John Nash’s Royal Pavilion in Brighton, it is eye-wateringly over-the-top, a showy statement of late-Empire wealth built just before the entire world fractured in 1914.

My time was drawing to a close, so I ducked into a quiet basement tavern to try the local cure-all: Riga Black Balsam. A thick, jet-black herbal liquor that dates back to the 18th century, it was originally brewed by a pharmacist to cure Empress Catherine the Great of a stomach ache.

Drinking it neat in the damp Latvian afternoon is a profoundly humanizing experience—partly because it burns your throat with the intensity of pure jet fuel, and partly because it forces you to sit entirely still while the tram rattles past outside.

Two nights here is barely enough to scratch the surface of a place that has been conquered, liberated, rewritten, and redesigned so many times. But as you walk back to the station, passing the colossal, repurposed Zeppelin hangars that now house the Central Market, you realise that Riga doesn’t hide its scars. It simply incorporates them into the architecture.

END AI-GENERATED

And maybe I can just travel now without having to spend too much time on the blog? Well, as I say, sort-of.

It’s captured something of my style I think, the titles, the attempt to summarise what’s happened in a place and blend it in with what you feel when you’re there. And to me it looks like it goes further, it’s more comprehensive and authoritative than my witterings, it’s a complete summary of the whole place in one go. And – ahem – maybe it reads better?

But if generative AI can maybe build something out of what you feed it, at the moment it can’t capture you. And there’s nothing here that captures my stick – the corny jokes, the old-man milieu, the attempt to work in as much sport as possible. And I think that what I try to do is put my experiences out in this blog, my own internal dialogue as I work out my own spin on what’s around me – sometimes fun, sometimes serious – and I’m not seeing that in the AI version. A good thing or a bad thing? Up to the reader.

Interestingly the three links it’s given as its source material (see the bottom of my post) are all about George Orwell’s version of “Orwellian”, whereas I’m just mainly channeling the East Anglian river in my handle (the same one Orwell took as his penname). Obviously it’s been asked to use “Orwelliantwo.com” to write about a place that’s undergone Stalinism and added two plus two together.

And very appropriately, if you know your Orwell, come up with five.

Oh, and there’s no pics. And, come on, where are the statues?

The main shortcut here is that I’ve now told you all about the basics of Riga’s history in something that’s based on my style rather than a cut-paste from Wikipedia. There are a few bits missing that could be brought out, but this is a city – and region – with a complex, challenging past which I hope to bring out as we wander around over the next two-and-a-bit days (I don’t know where Gemini got two nights from. I’m here for four. Still not enough to get the complete picture across).

And I promise it’ll all be good old human rubbish as usual from here.

Google Gemini’s links:

1) https://share.google/Ffto2TdRZjTma5sdH

2) https://share.google/ecfp3SnRCz9aaVKQq

3) https://share.google/airRdYZG9mKJf3guN
Shipshape?

June 30, 2026

The wind was high and the water rolled as the sails billowed and billowed well. We slipped anchor with the sun high on the yardarm and the fellows gave a hearty cheer and a Yo Ho Ho!, as hearty a Yo Ho Ho! as would awaken the quick and the dead, as great a cheer as the good old, wicked old town of Brigstow had ever heard.

“Timbers shivered, mainbrace spliced, rum bottled! We sail for the Main!” boomed our great captain, no less a blackbeard than Sir Edward Tench himself. “To the Main, to fortune, to adventure!” And so we slipped away across the harbour, Spike Island receding to the stern, just as John Cabot himself had done (if we’d followed his route we’d have to call it Foundagainland)…

“To adventure!” shouted back the hearty lads, breaking out into jolly shanties that involved lots of rum and other stuff that can’t go into a respectable travel blog.

“To fortune I hope, good Sir” whispered our well-deserved, well-renumerated sailing companion, the great Sir Edward Colston himself. “Remember”, he sneered, ” that I am the great and respectable benefactor of the city and my generosity requires the safe passage of my, err, special helpers here”. As he shook their chains he went on. “My dear captain, you are a mere, dastardly pirate. On the other hand a look at the calendar will show you that everything I get up to will be perfectly fine for another three hundred years or so and absolutely nobody will have a problem with it in this port until then. Well apart from that Clarkson fellow. And that Sancho chap. And all their friends. Anyway, as I was saying… nobody will have a problem…”

But as we sailed into the Avon and passed through the great gorge of Clifton, things became…suspenseful. The special helpers suddenly broke free of their chains, grabbed Colston and threw him over the side, and it made quite the splash. The last time I saw him he was sinking to the bottom of the rolling Avon, a balaclava in one hand, a spray gun in the other.

“Aha! He’s made it!” Tench exclaimed to my astonishment. “He made it to the shore and he’s… he’s spraying something onto the rocks over there.”

I couldn’t see him, so Tench got tetchy. He pointed to the shoreline.

“Not the river!” he shouted “Bank! See!”

Suddenly the sea shanties changed and the ship went to action stations. We’d come under a massive attack…

And then I woke up.

Fortunately I decided not to leave it to my fever dream and instead I got out and about and did my own exploration of Bristol. I’m not here for long, and this can only be a very short snapshot of what I encountered so if I missed anything out we’ve already captured the main points. Let’s see what else we can find.

Bristol is a great port city at the mouth of the River Avon, just upstream from the great gorge at Clifton. The port made Bristol’s fortune from the Middle Ages onwards, and its site near the western Atlantic approaches made it highly convenient as a starting point for great exploratory ventures such as John Cabot’s famous trip to Newfoundland.

Then Bristol got greedy. Atlantic exploration led to the Atlantic slave trade, and they went all-in in this town. Wikipedia claims that around 2000 Bristolian ships carried 500 000 African souls to enslavement and misery between 1700 and 1807, and there were over 200 slave traders here, almost twice as many as London. Bristol also got in on the smuggling and piracy business, and together with the slavers, the abolitionists, the pirates, the odd legitimate trader, it must have been a rollicking old town to be in at times. Unless you were in chains.

Eventually the slave trade was abolished, the pirates were all hanged, and Bristol moved on. Isambard Kingdom Brunel built his railway from London, designed the SS Great Britain and scribbled up the plans for the Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon Gorge. Bristol remained an important port into the 20th century, important enough for the Germans to bomb it heavily during the second world war. The port moved out further downstream but the rollicking continues in this student city, with the Bristol Sound of EDM groups like Massive Attack, and the street art movements led by the town’s most famous son(s?), Banksy.

Befitting a great city of discovery, my own revelation was that Bristol had a great mediaeval cathedral and here it is, right on the corner of genteel College Green in the centre of town.

It’s a grand space, a convenient retreat from the city buzz around it, well the sedate collegiate hum anyway, we’re not far from Bristol University. The cathedral is particularly worth checking out if only for the memorials to the local worthies and the great and good. This being Bristol though, many of the “great-and-good” were active in slavery.

The grandiloquent Codrington Memorial commemorates one of the great plantation-owning families in the British colonies in the Caribbean. What struck me as well were the unctuous memorial plaques to their fellow slaveowners to the sides, where we read about just how wonderful, honest, devout these people were, no finer men etc. It’s so brazen it feels like a showy statement of the power and influence of the plantation interest, and maybe the later plaques acted as a cynical middle finger to the abolitionists? “Well, we think we’re God’s gift, and we own this town, so whaddya gonna do about it?”

Which leads us to the Colston Window.

Sir Edward Colston, 1636-1721. Merchant, philanthropist, great Bristol benefactor, and humongous slave trader. A man of many talents, in 2020 he became Britain’s greatest diver since Tom Daley after a famous aquatic feat at the harbour. Here’s his commemorative window, and to the left you can see the modern plaque that covers up the original unctuousness. They’re looking at replacing the window, by the way.

If you think that’s cancelling, you should see what happened to his statue.

It’s the 7th of June in the febrile, COVID year of 2020, and a crowd has gathered around Colston’s statue in the centre of town. They’re not tourists – COVID has put a stop to travel. It should have put a stop to public gatherings of any sort, but this is the spring of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests that have followed the murder of George Floyd by US policemen. People are angry and will come out regardless. Bristol has a notorious slaving history, a large Afro-Caribbean community – and a rebellious, rollicking streak. A community that had already seen off a public transport employment colour bar in the Sixties by boycotting the buses. The name of Colston is memorialised everywhere in the city, it’s upset people for decades, and now is the time to do something about it.

Eventually people clamber around, get some ropes, and the statue is hauled to the ground. It’s defaced and hauled a hundred metres or so to the harbour wall, where it is unceremoniously dumped into the water – not before someone re-enacts George Floyd’s death by kneeling on its neck.

Somewhere near here

Quite so, just ask Edward Colston.

(This is somewhere else in the harbour. I just liked the sign).

Bristol is still dealing with that hard part. The council fished out the statue and stuck it in the M Shed museum, leaving the plinth empty. But it kicked off a period of statue removal across the world, with the inevitable controversy.

What to do about how men like Colston are remembered is still a sensitive issue in Bristol. Are we erasing history, or uncovering marginalised voices? What do we do with memorials to tainted figures? How can we say that we shouldn’t apply the standards of today, when those standards were very similar to the ones being fought for by contemporary abolitionists? But if we agree with taking down outright bad eggs like Colston, where do we stop? Admiral Lord Nelson had pro-slavery views and links to the plantation interest. What does that mean for Nelson’s Column?

And of course, if we want to “restore” history by restoring the statue, isn’t that also erasing the historical reality of the events of June 7th 2020?

Time for a short walk along the harbour after all that heavy stuff.

Brunel’s SS Great Britain, the first iron steamer to cross the Atlantic (1845) and the largest passenger ship in the world when built. It’s now a museum ship. After a chequered career (it bankrupted the builders, for example) it was scuttled in 1937, then repaired before being brought back home to Bristol to great fanfare in 1970.

It’s half-an-hour’s walk along the quayside to another Brunel landmark.

No, not that, that’s just some Bristol street art.

It’s this.

If there is one definitive Bristol landmark, it’s the looming, monumental Clifton Suspension Bridge. The deck spans the Avon Gorge at 75 metres above high water level, and unfortunately you weren’t going to get me walking across it for you. Or even going to the famous viewpoint high up on the rocks. I think it has an awesome, chilling feel as you approach it from ground level and it suddenly rises over you, like a silent giant.

The beautifully elegant 412 metre long construction is based on Brunel’s design but he unfortunately didn’t live to see this icon being opened in 1864. Shout out to William Henry Barlow and John Hawkshaw, who carried out the redesign. (Work was scheduled during Brunel’s lifetime, but it was cancelled after Bristol rioted when the second Reform Bill was voted down by the Lords in 1831. Rebellious, remember…)

My time was running short and I returned to the centre…

…and its unfeasibly-large seagulls.

There was just time for some more street art

And of course, a Banksy.

Well Hung Lover appeared in 2006. It’s had a chequered history, mainly at the hands of rival street artists who have defaced it with paintballs in the past. It’s the first legally-recognised piece of street art in the country, and a condition of the lease of the building is that the mural must be maintained. I didn’t get out to see much more of the street art of Bristol, there’s lots more, and more Banksy’s, and it does make a visit here worthwhile.

For me two nights was enough, but there are enough channels of interest – the nautical history, the social history, the dark stuff, the modern vibe – to keep you interested and reward a longer stay in one of the more underrated destinations in the UK.

As you pass through the Gothic fantasy palace that is Temple Meads station, you pass an old friend standing outside the engine shed that formed his original station.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, engineering icon, visionary, a man who did as much as anyone to create the Bristol of today.

I don’t think this statue is coming down anytime soon.
Paris, part deux

June 15, 2026

It was time to say au revoir to Dieppe. Two nights there was probably enough, though I would not have said non to a couple more days of idle, picturesque wandering or lazying on the shore, if the weather had been up to it.

Pro tip. If you’re here in midweek in June it’s very quiet in the evening, there are bars and restaurants but you won’t find them by following the crowds. That of course has its benefits. Also, if you’re catching a train there seems to be nowhere in the immediate vicinity of the station to get something to eat except a small kiosk inside. The area around the station is rather bare, a little sad and left-behind.

Bear that in mind because there was only one train every two hours when I left town.

I ended up somewhere completely different. My last stop on the tour was – where else?

I’d been here last year, but it weaves a spell, does Paris, and anyway I like my trips to be loops rather than straight lines.

Bright and breezy in Brighton, dark and drizzly in Dieppe, the sun suddenly came out to party in Paris. The Normandy weather isn’t the best in France, but this looked like a general shift in conditions that was going to affect both sides of the channel. So I took up what the weather was giving me and dedicated this trip to just general meandering and cafe-sitting.

Just like last year, I’m not going to even try to capture this enormous city in a couple of blogs. Instead I’m going to have a look at the pictures I’ve been taking and seeing what stories emerge.

Revolution

The July Column stands on the site of the infamous Bastille prison, feared by anyone who criticised the Ancien Regime or otherwise stepped out of line. By the time of the Revolution of 1789, it wasn’t as bad as some of the Ancien Regime’s other prisons – a series of reforms had left very few prisoners here. But bad reputations are hard to shift, and when matters came to a head between the monarchy and the people, and the people needed a symbol of the regime to vent their fury on, there was only one choice. And vent their fury they certainly did on July 14th 1789, storming the prison when negotiations to hand it over appeared to fail.

With the prison cleared away – along with the Ancien Regime – plans were in place to build a monument here, and a column was erected in 1833. They’d originally planned to put it up in 1792, but stuff happened and when Napoleon came to power he wanted a different monument and for while there was a plaster cast of it here.

It was an elephant. Great thinking, Napoleon.

This is a revered part of Paris, and the people of Paris honour it with their most sacred, traditional rituals – political demonstrations. The 1789 Revolution wasn’t televised, and they’ve been trying to correct that programming error ever since.

Remember

Monumental

Every time I come to Paris I’m struck by the sheer elegance and grandeur of the streets and the buildings, like everyone else is, but this time I realised something else. It’s not just a grandeur of ascetic ambition. It’s all – so – big. The Louvre seems to go on forever and looms over you, the delicate -looking Tuileries gardens roll on endlessly, and at the other end of the wide-as-a-mile Champs Elysees lies the Arc de Triomphe, literally standing there, size of a planet, feeling as it’s made out of every stone ever quarried in France. In case you think this was just the grandiosity of the old days, head to the river and the 20th-century museum of modern art, which looks – enormous.

Is the uniqueness of Paris down to this sense that you are standing in the monumental capital of a great global cultural empire and poor you – 18th-century peasant, 19th-century colonial subject, 21th-century visitor – are here to feel suitably overwhelmed and forced to bow in supplication? In which case thinking about Paris wasn’t about thinking about two lovers kissing on the banks of the Seine to the sound of a beret-wearing accordion player.

The centre of Paris was a little different in the 19th century, different in the sense of being much worse. It was over-crowded, disease-ridden, a breeding ground for crime, discontent and insurrection. Impressed by the public works he’d seen in London, Emperor Napoleon III commissioned a man called Georges-Eugène Haussmann to give the place a good old makeover, to clear away the slums and make it all aerier and lighter. In short, make Paris, well, Paris.

Haussmann set to work in 1853 and by 1870 most of it was done. The grand, broad boulevards, the main axes, the great public parks, the unified style of the new buildings, it was all down to Baron Haussmann. Basically the Paris we know is as much Haussmann as much as anyone else’s. Even one of Haussmann’s baser motives – wide boulevards make it easier to deploy troops to deal with uprisings – has a truly Parisian touch.

In the end we are left with a great city that was redesigned to be monumental and grand, and the planners have never forgotten it.

Sacred and secular

I’d been aware of the church of Saint Sulpice before, but I’d never thought about visiting it until now and I’d popped along seeing I was pottering around the Left Bank anyway. So I was rather taken aback by how ginormous this place is.

The church is a Baroque rebuild which was started in 1646 and finished in the following century. The west facade was based on St Paul’s in London but the interior has that same neoclassical clarity and – that word – monumentality. Very impressive murals from Delacroix too.

Here comes the science bit. To help them work out when the equinoxes were due – and hence the date of Easter – the English astronomer Henry Sully laid down a brass gnomon, a meridian which runs across the floor and along which the sunlight at local noon tracks as the year runs from solstice to solstice. A hole was cut in the south transept window, the noon reflection gets nearest the window at summer solstice, it’s furthest away at winter solstice (there’s an obelisk across the nave) and halfway across there’s a copper plate where the light lands on the equinoxes. Here’s a photo of the summer solstice point.

The French Revolution was notoriously pro-rational and anti-clerical, and Wikipedia believes this scientific, rational instrument may have saved Saint Sulpice from destruction.

Well, I found all of that interesting anyway.

C’est Paris

These were just my thoughts over the last couple of days. If I come back I will probably have a different spin on things, seeing things from a different angle, from a different part of the Seine maybe, or musing from a different pavement café.

The thing about endless cities is that your perspectives of them are endlessly changing, always being added to, seen in new light. The good thing about an endless city like Paris – or London – is that you can’t do them in one day, one blog post, one visit, so you have to constantly revisit it, and revisit your preconceptions. And that is one of the joys of travel.

Fortunately you don’t mind having to come back. Because the other thing about the great endless cities is that there is an essence to them, a buzz, an allure, that is also endless, that never stops drawing you in. And I know I’ll be back here one day.

À bientôt!
In deep

June 12, 2026

After four pleasant, if slightly pitching and rolling, hours, the ferry from Newhaven eventually glides into the harbour at Dieppe. And most passengers will immediately step on the gas – or in many cases the bike pedal – and head on into lovely Normandy to reach Paris and the warmer parts of France. But Dieppe is worth some more of your time if you can spare it; it’s a rather picturesque port town, the nearest beach resort for the Parisians, and a place redolent with poignant 20th-century events that should be better known.

Dieppe sounds “deep”, and so it should; the name derives from the Anglo-Saxon or Norse for, well, “deep”. The river was the deep thing, and the Normans who lived here were descended from Norse-speaking Viking settlers. One day the local Norman duke, William, fancied doing the reverse of my journey across the Channel. I’d booked ahead, but William turned up on spec – it was frankly one in the eye for King Harold. Afterwards the Normans ruled England as well as Normandy, and Dieppe was able to profit from the increased trade between the two.

Dieppe got caught up in the Anglo-French wars and – after a bit of Agincourting and Joan-of-Arcing – Normandy arrived in the Renaissance as a fully paid-up member of France. And it’s in the early 16th century that we meet the redoubtable figure of one Jehan Ango. Born into a rich ship-owning family, Ango got even richer by getting in on the new start-up industry involving European ships sailing over unknown oceans, meeting unknown peoples, and taking everything they had. Under Ango’s patronage sailors from Dieppe reached Brazil, Africa, the Pacific, and the eastern coast of North America, and the port had grown to a town of 40000 people and was quite “cosmopolitan” according to a placard in the main church.

Church? Let me lead you down through the quaint streets (look out for the not-so-quaint e-scooter riders…) and show you the Eglise Saint-Jacques.

Rebuilt, after a fire, between the 13th and late-14th centuries, the church was dedicated to St James and hence became a fixture on the pilgrim’s route to Compostela in Spain. It looks a little worse-for-wear now, but during Dieppe’s golden years of exploration, the money was there to embellish it, to add a tower and some chapels. And at the heart of the benefaction was our favourite rich Dieppe bloke, Jehan Ango.

The church’s most notable feature is a frieze that Ango had commissioned to commemorate all the great explorations he’d been financing. In honour of all the peoples the explorers were encountering, they charmingly called it the Frieze of Savages.

It’s the narrow strip above all the flowery Gothic arches, look closely and you can make out figures representing indigenous people from the Americas, Africa and Asia. They’re not easy to spot, I didn’t have a selfie stick with me, sorry, but there’s a handy placard nearby that goes through it all in French.

By the way the plain empty stones below the arches do not represent what was left of those folk once the explorers had finished with them, but anyway it’s an impressive piece of work, capturing this pivotal moment at the beginning of the colonial encounter between Europe and the wider world, the lands and islands across the Atlantic and Pacific. Victor Hugo was a fan of the frieze, the well-known hunchback botherer calling it “stone lace”.

Dieppe didn’t, er, “frieze” its voyaging, and sailors from here would be key to the colonialisation of Canada and the French West Indies. On one occasion European ships came to a place, bombarded it, and turned the inhabitants’ wooden houses to smoking firewood. The Europeans were English and Dutch, the year was 1694, and unfortunately for Dieppe, the place was Dieppe. Following the cataclysm of 1694 the town was rebuilt, but it never recaptured the glories of its seafaring past.

But, sadly, history hadn’t forgotten about Dieppe.

It is the summer of 1942. Normandy, and Dieppe, are under Nazi occupation. As is common along much of the northern French coastline Dieppe is heavily fortified with German coastal batteries and bunkers.

Meanwhile the Allies are in a fix. The Battle of Britain has kept Hitler’s forces constrained to the southern banks of the Channel, but he has now turned his attention to the Soviet Union. Stalin is demanding that his western allies relieve the pressure by attacking the Germans in the west to force them to fight on two fronts. The Americans under Roosevelt are more keen than the British, but in desperate need of some sort of propaganda victory they come up with an interim plan. Why don’t we raid a port in occupied France and bring the guys back that same day? We could use it to see if we could capture and hold a port when it came to the real thing. Plus we could destroy some German defences and radar stations and while we’re at it, the Germans would be forced to drag in some of their air squadrons from the Eastern Front and that would make Stalin happy. Sounds like a plan…

The Allies chose Dieppe for the raid, partly because of its proximity to RAF and naval bases in England. The date: July 1942, eventually moved to 19th August because of the weather. Codename: Operation Jubilee. The outcome…well…

It is later in the day on the 19th August 1942. The raid has been going on now since the early morning, hundreds of amphibious boats have landed – or tried to land – about 6000 mostly Canadian men on this beach in Dieppe and on four points to the east and west of the town. And…it’s been a disaster. The Germans had not been unaware of what was going on and have engaged the Allies across most of the landing sites. The odd objective here and there has been met, but most haven’t. The Luftwaffe has been called up, and above the skies are raging with an air battle on the scale of the Battle of Britain, but the Allies are losing far more planes than the enemy. Some Canadians get across the esplanade and reach the town, but most don’t get that far. Amid the chaos, the only thing is to call a retreat.

And so on this beach that you see above, survivors are battling their way to get inside a corral of tanks that has formed on the pebbly shore. Look at the photo above and try to imagine the horrific sights and sounds of that day in 1942 – explosions, smoke, fire, screams, cries, death…

Over half the 6000 men who landed were either killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The Canadians – some of whom might have been descendants of those settlers from Dieppe – suffered a 68% casualty rate. Was it worth it? Well the Allies knew that good intelligence was going to be key before the big one, and they changed their mind about the importance of capturing ports (but they were already developing the famous floating “Mulberry harbours”). Whether the Allies learnt anything at all from Dieppe that they didn’t learn from other landings is still controversial. How much did the sacrifices at Dieppe pave the road to D-Day? Not sure.

If history didn’t forget about Dieppe, Dieppe hasn’t forgotten the Canadians and the other heroes of the raid. Le Memorial du 19 Aout 1942, a little museum staffed by extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic young staff, tells the moving story, showcases military memorabilia, and asks the questions about the how and the why. There is a cemetery near the town where many of the Canadians are buried. And along the beach you run into many memorials to the companies and battalions that fought so bravely that day.

I’ll leave you with the memorial on Red Beach. Each of the five landing sites were given a colour. Red Beach was in the centre of Dieppe, reaching to the harbour wall. 553 men of a Canadian regiment, the Essex Scottish Regiment, stormed up this beach. Only 51 of them made it home that day, and two of those men would succumb to their wounds.

Designed by a Canadian student called Rory O’Connor and dedicated in 2006, the memorial has a maple leaf cut-away in the plinth and an inlay in the ground. At 1pm every 19th August, the moment the Dieppe Raid was called off, the cut-away focusses a beam of sunlight onto the silver leaf, illuminating it.

It was chilly in Dieppe when I took the photos and, later on, the clouds rolled in. But I hope it will be bright enough on the 19th August for the leaf to once again shine, and remind us of what it took to defeat the darkness of fascism. The same dark clouds are engulfing us again. The world needs to find a light to lead the way home.
A new haven?

June 10, 2026

The last time I was in Brighton, I hopped on the train and took the short, picturesque ride to the small port town of Newhaven. Cut in two by the River Ouse, Newhaven rather scrappily straddles its way along the river down to the shingly beaches.

Newhaven has had shingle trouble down the years. The shingle had built up into a spit that blocked the Ouse’s passage to the sea, allowing neighbouring Seaford – gateway to the Seven Sisters – to steal a march and become the principal port hereabouts. In the 1500s they cut through the spit and let geography do the rest – it’s more sheltered as a harbour than Seaford. Unfortunately geography also kept delivering shingle, and in the late 1700s they set about creating a breakwater to prevent longshore drift. They were so sure they’d got it right this time that people started calling it the “new haven”. Since then it’s had its moments, especially since the railway came in the 1800s and the ferry service to Dieppe in Normandy started. In the First World War it was the principal port for the despatch of men to the front and in the Second, men left here for the tragic Dieppe Raid in 1942. Thirty years later, having (allegedly, of course) committed his own tragedy (allegedly), Lord Lucan’s blood-spattered car was found here. It’s unlikely he’d come to the port town of Newhaven to visit the old fort.

My photo roll from five years ago suggests I was most taken with the shingly beach on the west side of the quay. The Sussex and Kent coasts are essentially where the South Downs marches down to the sea, and the engagement with the English Channel has left sheer chalky cliff faces in many places, most famously the Seven Sisters and the White Cliffs of Dover. Newhaven’s cliffs have their own drama, as I recorded at the time…

Stunning as the scenery was, it was something else that made the biggest impression.

You’ll recall from my last post that this was five years ago, when COVID still made foreign travel very difficult. Not impossible, as I noted while standing on the quayside watching the ferry slide in from Dieppe that sunny July afternoon. Just very difficult, as I noted when I saw how empty it was. (Turns out that the French decided to keep this subsidised route going for the duration.)

But it was the first time I’d laid eyes on just about anything, or anyone, travelling between the UK and the rest of the world. And suddenly I felt the old sense of wonder about the mystique, the glamour, of foreign travel. It had only been eighteen months or so since my last trip abroad, but (as you can tell from the drop-down) I was used to travelling much more frequently than that, and the long absence left me feeling the same sense of innocent awe I had when boarding the ferry to Calais the first time I left the country on my own, thirty-five long years ago.

I did of course think, it’s just the Normandy-Dieppe ferry, there are easier ways to travel abroad.

But at that moment it looked different…and then as time went on, I remembered how much I’d enjoyed Brighton…and later read a bit about Dieppe…and a plan came together.

Back to today. Above you can see a few views of the quayside and the Ouse. The wooden piles are all that remain of the old swing bridge before the current one was swung into place in the seventies.

Unfortunately much of the eastern bank is Border Force territory – as I was rather firmly informed just a while ago – so you’ll have to imagine the decent view of the western side that I was going to include. Well, all the better to head to the port building, take a seat, and relax until it’s time to board.

And see how the rest of the plan comes together…
Let’s rock

June 9, 2026

The last time I was in Brighton was in the summer of 2021. COVID restrictions were easing as vaccine coverage steadily improved across the nation, but the virus was still prevalent enough to make foreign travel pretty tricky. I had intended to therefore take a short break in York, and was all set to leave the house when I checked the train times – and found that things were still so tricky that every train out of London seemed to be fully reserved. Fortunately most trains to the south coast allow you to turn up on spec, and with the weather hotting up that July weekend I ripped up my plans, and headed for Brighton instead. It was that sort of time.

That was a glorious weekend, sunny and glorious enough to encourage a wander up and down the famous Seven Sisters cliffs between Seaford and Eastbourne, and even a fascinating afternoon in the small port of Newhaven, as well as wandering around the lovely seafront and quirky back streets of Brighton, one of the most vibrant cities in the country.

I’d always wanted to come back, and suddenly the opportunity has presented itself this unusually chilly June. Well at least the blustery, temperamental conditions have kept away the crowds that were there five years ago, plus the fact these are workdays. But despite it all the sun is managing to break through the stormy clouds, and it still looks like summer if you’ve wrapped up well enough.

And when it looks like summer here, it looks glorious.

Around the first half of the 18th century, Brighton was a fishing town down on its luck. Fishing was mackerel fishing, and it was profitable enough to support a growing town as it started to boom from the 16th century onwards. But that appears to have been partly because the French had stopped attacking it for a bit. They came back for more during the 17th century, and the town was also subject to devastating storms of nature (I told you it was blustery).

As the town’s population halved to 2000 by the 18th century, along came one Dr Richard Russell, of nearby Lewes. Dr Russell believed that seawater could cure many illnesses, just by bathing in it – and drinking it. He wrote a book about it. And a lot of the well-to-do of the time believed him. Dr Russell moved to Brighton (which was well-stocked with seawater) just as transport connections were improving and other docs such as Dr Mahomed from India were cottoning on to the growing popularity of the place for the not-so-feeling-so-well-to-do (Dr Mahomed opened a steam bath here).

One keen fan of the health fads was a chap called George. That’ll be George, Prince of Wales if you please, subsequently Prince Regent, then more subsequently George IV. Now George was a bit of a good-time guy who wasn’t too careful with his money – sorry, with our money. Having rented out a farmhouse in the centre of town for whenever he wanted to come down here and live it up – sorry, I mean take the waters for his gout – he decided to really go to town and have it rebuilt in the most flashy Orientalist fantasy you could imagine.

By the early 1820s, after about £145 million pounds (in modern money) had been spent by the taxpayer, John Nash had completed the Royal Pavilion.

A royal palace that is like no other in the country, it was built as a fantasy riff on Indian Mughal architecture. At least that’s what the exterior tells you. Go inside and it all turns very, very Chinese.

And very, very, over-the-top.

Lotuses. Fake bamboo fittings, amongst the royal red and gold, the glittering and the dazzling. One-tonne chandeliers above the royal banqueting table. 18th-century chinoserie at its most eye-wateringly extravagant – and expensive.

Oh, and there’s dragons. I nearly forgot the dragons. They’ve got dragons everywhere. Chandeliers, ceilings, walls, there’s Chinese dragons everywhere, flying about on their big old elaborate wings. All the dragons.

Good point, well spotted. Chinese dragons don’t have wings. European dragons do, not Chinese ones.

Although you feel that you’ve stepped from Europe into Asia, remember that virtually the whole palace was decorated by European artists and craftsmen, people who’d never seen a proper Chinese dragon and assumed they’d have wings like their scaly Celtic or Greek friends. Yes, the whole place is a fake, a grand folly, and that’s the sort of thing I think Georgie boy, the dissolute, debt-ridden Playa Of Wales would absolutely be there for. A later exhibit in the palace tour details how much maintenance would be required down the ages to keep the rather shoddy, leaky, dry-rot-ridden place in one piece.

When I visited, one of the rooms was showcasing this artwork, a tapestry made in collaboration with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Sorry for the diversion, let’s get back to the tour. My fault. For a minute there, I lost myself…

Indeed not only is the whole interior something of a pastiche, it’s all been rather reassembled and restored down those same ages. When Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, you can imagine that such gaudiness would have rather affronted the original Victorian. Well it wasn’t so much the Brighton Pavilion she objected to as much as Brighton itself. Privacy was a problem, and after she and Prince Albert ran across a group of likely lads who tried to stare up into her bonnet one day, that was it and she upped sticks. But not before stripping all the decorations and shipping them up to Buckingham Palace (some of it has come back). The pavilion was sold to the town council, who still own it, making it the only royal palace in the country that’s owned by the people and not the crown.

And so it stood, for decade after decade, a gloriously fake extravaganza of fantasy Asia, right in the centre of Brighton

And then the real Asia turned up in 1914.

And the nonsense took a back seat.

As the First World War broke out and wore on through the late months of 1914, Britain found itself short of soldiers to hold off the German advance through Belgium and towards Northern France. That meant Britain had to turn to its Empire, and around 140000 men of the Indian Army would serve on the Western Front. These men were trained – and dressed – to keep the borders of their homelands secure (for the empire of course) and here they were, fighting for their imperial masters, in a cold Northern European climate, having swapped imperial police actions for warfare as wholesale industrial slaughter. There were, of course, thousands of casualties, but fortunately just across the Channel the British had a rather Oriental-like property that would make any hospitalised Indian soldier feel right at home…

Over 2000 Indian soldiers were treated in the Royal Pavilion between 1914 and 1916 when the Indian Army was redeployed to Mesopotamia. The old photographs show these men’s beds were laid out in some of the same opulent rooms built for the pleasure of a Prince Regent a century before. And incredibly, only about 30 men lost their lives here.

To their credit, the British took every care to do right by the Indians, from employing British-based Indian doctors as well as British, to ensuring the specific dietary and devotional requirements of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh soldiers were adhered to. Well-meaning intent? Or good PR to offset any protests from the Indian independence movement and counter German propaganda about poor treatment being dished out to Indians? I’ll leave that to yourselves to decide – and for you to maybe read more about this story to make up your mind.

Because in the turbulent, hate-filled days of 2026, this is a story that should be better known.

Where the King goes, the fashionable and the fanciful are bound to follow, and they certainly did follow down to Brighton. And grand hotels such as the, er, Grand, were built on the seafront to cater for them. And where the railway goes, everyone will end up going, the hoi-polloi will end up pushing the posh noses out of joint, and eventually the Mods and the Rockers will end up pushing each other’s noses out of joint. (Literally.)

At one time in the Victorian period there were three piers along Brighton beach. Only one, the Palace Pier, survives.

Amazingly enough, the West Pier is still a Grade I structure – despite being abandoned in the 1970s and suffering storms and fires since then.

Brighton, then. One of Britain’s most popular seaside resorts, a short hop from London, a pulsating nightlife centre, a university town. A liberal, off-beat, indie sort of place, a byword for tolerance and a centre of the LGBT+ community.

Brighton, a seaside town, that despite all the good stuff hasn’t escaped the blight of deprivation that afflicts many old resort towns. In the same way the Grand Hotel didn’t escape the attentions of the IRA on the 12th October 1984, when they bombed the attendees at the Conservative Party Conference and killed five people.

Brighton, a town centre that well rewards a wander through the weird and wonderful places that seem to line the nooks and crannies, especially in the charming old rabbit warren of the Lanes.

Especially welcoming if it’s blustery by the seafront.
Mercy, mercy me…

April 10, 2026

The superstar looks out from his beachside apartment, out onto the endless stretch of soft golden sand as the waves break in the near distance, blue waves under an endless blue sky. All very much as you would expect, as he would expect. For this is a special superstar. His voice has been one of the seminal voices of the 1960s, a tender, sweet sensual voice that has helped to define the success of the extraordinary musical institution that is Motown. His recording of I Heard It Through The Grapevine is considered one of the greatest songs ever produced. Had time stopped in 1970 he would have been acclaimed as one of popular music’s greatest singer-songwriters.

But time didn’t stop, and neither did he. After badgering the record company to take what they saw as a risk, he would release a song that in 1971 would eventually become the title song of an album called What’s Going On, soul music’s first great concept album, a sublime merging of R&B, the blues, funk and gospel music that gave glorious voice to a searing critique of the Vietnam War and of the social injustices experienced by African Americans.

A superstar all right, an icon, a legend. But life hasn’t always been great for Marvin Gaye. Raised in difficult circumstances with a physically abusive father, Gaye’s music must have been an escape but the pressures of the music business would have brought their own demons. By the end of the seventies he was struggling with a cocaine addiction and being chased for unpaid taxes. We find him in his sunny apartment at the beginning of the 1980s, having completed a European tour.

But this beach isn’t in LA or Florida. No palm trees here. Blue sky as far as the eye can see, warm April sun, but – as I found out today – a sea breeze to freeze your pina colada in seconds. What has brought one of the biggest stars of American music to a blustery ferry port on Belgium’s North Sea coast? To quote the man himself – what’s going on?

A fishing village that became an important harbour, Ostend grew as a beach resort in the 19th century thanks to the patronage of the Belgian king Leopold I and the colonial genocidal criminal Leopold II. (As condemned by his contemporaries, by the way). But Ostend’s location on the North Sea coast, so close to Britain and France, meant devastation during both world wars. It is still a big town, a sizeable tourist resort, but the buildings are chillingly modern. A 19th-century cathedral still stands but nothing much else from earlier times. Most people in Britain probably think of Ostend as just a ferry port (as I did). But it’s Belgium’s biggest beach resort, and the area around the beach still has that classy buzz of a European fun- time place.

The massive Kursaal in the final photo here is casino and concert hall all in one. The original was built in 1878, but was destroyed in the Second World War. Rebuilt in 1950, its 10000 square metres would make it Europe’s largest casino.

As for the concerts, amongst the names that have graced the stage here includes one Marvin Gaye…

At the end of his European tour, Gaye has been saddled with a tax bill for $4.5 million. No surprise that he stays in London. But being in London probably means being close to cocaine. So a Belgian music producer suggests Gaye relocates to his own apartment on the beachfront in Ostend. Gaye agrees and in 1981 brings one of his sons over with him on the Dover ferry.

The superstar looks out of his beachside apartment, refreshed, not just because of the bracing North Sea air. Marvin Gaye is in a better place. He has been keeping away from cocaine, and finding community at a local church. It’s time to knock out some more tunes.

And so here, at Residence Jane, Albert I Promenade no.77, he closes the apartment window, the better for stopping his notepaper flying in the sea breeze. Out comes his pen, maybe a bit of humming too, and Gaye sets to work on scribbling out a song that he would title “Sexual Healing”.

The song is a sensation and a classic. The man still has it, in all sorts of ways. A paeon to procreation, there are billions of people under forty years old in the world and many of them probably exist because of this song. The rest are probably being lied to by their parents. In a better place, Gaye is now able to find an even better place and he moves to a huge villa outside the city. He’ll go back to the States in 1983.

But drugs and debts follow him, and he has to move in with his parents. In 1984, he tries to stop yet another fight between them, and his father pulls out a gun and shoots him.

The next day Marvin Gaye would have been 45 years old.

The North Sea waves break in the near distance, away down the endless stretch of the Ostend sands. But the clouds are coming in, and the spring sunshine offers no more relief from the steady breeze.

It’s time to get the train back to Bruges.
In Bruges

April 10, 2026

Historic, beautifully-preserved, charming, the canal-lined old town of Bruges is one of the most popular attractions in Europe. And you’ll soon find out just how popular; it won’t be long before you have to step out into the cobbled streets because the narrow pavements are thronged with visitors.

Like other Flemish trading cities such as Ghent, Bruges’ prosperity was built on its access to the North Sea. Ah…if you’ve actually clicked on that link, you’ll see what I really used to think about Bruges. Well, the background is that three years before my posts on Ghent I spent a day in Bruges while on another trip. It was July and Bruges was heaving. Obviously that was high-season and we’re now here in early spring, and Bruges is still busy, and there are long queues for the canal boat tours, but it doesn’t feel as crowded as on my last trip. We’ll see if my views have changed. Anyway, back to the Middle Ages…

The 83-metre tall Belfry is probably Bruges’ signature landmark and looks proudly over the great Market Square – to be frank, it looks over much of the old town. To put something up that size requires serious self-confidence and hard cash, and after the storm in 1134 that re-flooded its silted inlet to the sea, Bruges spent the Middle Ages getting very rich. The wool trade was the foundation, and then the canny locals built on Italian innovations in commerce and finance to create the world’s first stock exchange in 1309. Traders from go-ahead cities such as Genoa and Venice set up shop here, and the place was buzzing.

As usual, fine bank accounts led to fine buildings, and Bruges’s magnificent old town took shape, full of opulent municipal edifices, palazzos and churches. The last of the photos above is of the Bloedbasiliek, the Church of the Holy Blood. Bruges became an important pilgrimage centre as holy relics flooded into the town, and this one holds a relic of Christ’s blood collected by Joseph of Arimathea after the Crucifixion. (Bloedbasiliek‘s literal English translation? Blood Basilica. I can’t say if I’m a fan or not, I’m not familiar with Black Sabbath’s albums.)

Now that you’ve read both my posts from Ghent, you may be wondering, did Bruges suffer the same upheavals that other parts of Flanders suffered under the Habsburgs and during the Wars of Religion? Well it doesn’t appear so, not quite to the same extent. But ructions did happen from time to time. Facing the Belfry in the two photos above are two fine chaps, the weaver Pieter de Coninck and his mate, the butcher Jan Breydal. They were 14th-century weavers and butchers, living at a time when the now-prosperous city fancied going it alone as a city-state separate from the County of Flanders. Unfortunately, the County of Flanders begged to differ, and French troops were garrisoned in the town. In an echo of the infamous Sicilian Vespers, the troops held a feast on the 17th May 1302, and that night de Coninck and Breydal led their fellow insurrectionists in giving two thousand of them the ultimate hangover cure. They followed up their Bruges Matins by defeating the French at the Battle of the Golden Spurs (remember, football fans, this was a very, very long time ago, back in the distant past when Spurs could be thought of as golden). The statue went up in the 19th century, reflecting how our two heroes were venerated as early icons of Belgian independence.

A bit more from the stroppy Bruggers in a moment, but let’s go wandering again.

Historic, charming, untouched Bruges, and you must be heartened by the foresightedness of the city leaders to have maintained this medieval jewel for so many future generations. But it’s not so simple.

Bruges might be defined by wool, or its famous lace, or any number of nice four-letter words. But in the end the one that matters above all is: silt. What the weather gods give us they can assuredly take away, and in 1500 the Zwin inlet began silting up again. The enterprising citizens turned to lace-making to revive their fortunes, but their town couldn’t avoid being eclipsed by Antwerp’s rise to prominence. Unlike Ghent, the Industrial Revolution passed Bruges by and it fell into a deep decline. The town therefore remained untouched and unmodernised, which came in handy as the nascent tourist industry developed in the 19th century.

Some insufficiently Antwerp-proof lace-making

Not every shop or house in the town centre is original, of course, but it does feel as quiet and laid-back as a large village, and for a large city it is astounding how much quiet wandering you can do along character-filled byways literally yards from the tourist hotspots. And, of course, it’s equally astonishing how it is that so many thousands of tourists can just congregate in the same old places and completely miss said backstreets literally around the corner from them.

One place everyone ends up in is probably Bruges’ most famous church, Onze Lievre Vrouwekerk, the Church of Our Lady.

At 115 metres high the tower of this 13th-15th century church even out-towers the belfry, but there is much more to see within the lovely interior. Steering away from the fine paintings and the relics, there are one or two attractions here that are worth talking about.

Inside the Lanchals Chapel, we find ourselves looking at the tomb of Pieter Lanchals, a friend of Maximilian of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor. Look up at the top and you’ll see a swan emblem on his heraldic shield. Keep it in mind for later.

Much of the Golden Age happened when the Duke of Burgundy set up court here in the 15th century. All good in the Flemish hood, right? Well, I did warn you that some more local stroppiness was on its way. Maximilian married into the Burgundians and Bruges bristled under the heavy taxes the Habsburgs levied on the town. In the late 15th century their patience snapped.

While Maximilian was visiting his old mate Lanchals in 1488, the stroppy bruggers found them and imprisoned them. Then they really got nasty. Forcing the emperor to watch, they tortured poor old Lanchals and then beheaded him, sticking his head on a spike. Lanchals translates as “long-neck” – hence the swan emblem – and I suppose if his neck was long enough the executioner would have had a pretty easy job of it.

But eventually Maximilian escaped, and when he returned to his throne he turned the whole swan-neck thing back on Bruges. And at the same time, history was doing its own turning – into legend. He is said to have decreed that as punishment the people of Bruges had to look after the swans in the canal until the city falls. And there the swans remain, to this day.

(There’s another legend about the swans, something to do with a woman who was locked up by her father because she wanted to marry someone he didn’t approve of, she escaped somehow and got Bruges to promise to keep their swans because she saw two of them during her imprisonment and they cheered her up. But I didn’t see her tomb in the church, so there)

(The more likely story is that medieval Bruges started keeping the swans as a sign of wealth and prestige and has just kept the tradition going. Borrrrr-riiiiing!)

Under royal protection?

Fascinating the story behind the Lanchals tomb may be, it’s not the main draw of the church. And it’s not the reason why they charge €10 to enter the east end. The real reason can be found in the neighbouring Mouscron tomb. (It’s the statue in the middle).

Michaelangelo’s exquisite Madonna and Child is the only example of his work that left Italy in his lifetime. It was originally commissioned for the huge sum of 100 ducats, and the Mouscrons got hold of it following a dispute between the artist and the original patrons. Such a gorgeous piece of work merited strict conditions of use, and the family expressly stipulated that no alterations could be made and that the statue could not be moved from the tomb.

Ah. About that last bit.

In 1794, much of Belgium, including Bruges, fell to the armies of the French Revolution. The French Revolution then became Napoleon, and he thought the statue would look good in the National Museum in Paris. It was only returned to Bruges in 1815 after the little corporal’s defeat at Waterloo. Only then could the Mouscrons’ wishes be fulfilled and the statue remain in the tomb.

Oops. Sorry again.

In 1940, all of Belgium, including Bruges, fell to the Blitzkrieg of Nazi Germany. Hitler thought the statue would look good in his planned new museum in Linz. This time it took the famous “Monuments Men” to go down a salt mine in Austria after the war and bring it back.

Today it’s back here in the Mouscron tomb and their request can finally be fulfilled, as we are in more enlightened days, the world is at peace, and our leaders aren’t corrupt, maniacal dictators and fascists who start illegal wars at the drop of a set of incriminating files.

Fingers crossed.

I think that the Madonna and Child does stand out amongst all the pretty decent artworks in the church, but the one that really struck me personally was Adriaen Isenbrandt’s Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows (1528-35).

Catholic teaching holds that the Virgin Mary experienced seven sorrows during the life of her son Jesus Christ, from the time of his circumcision to his crucifixion. And here they are, laid out around an unusually contemplative Mary. Virtually all the great religious artworks of medieval and Renaissance times seem to always depict the subjects in mannered, classical poses, with very formal expressions of ecstasy, agony, astonishment, fear, joy, as weird divinely-directed stuff happens to them. Here we get to see a Biblical figure taking a few moments to reflect for herself on all the devastating and extraordinary experiences that have been thrown at her, in contrast to the riot of stylised action all around her. It seems like an arresting and profoundly human representation for the time, well compared with the artwork I’m familiar with from those years.

And if you come to Bruges you may also feel your own connection with this figure, as you take a break from running around to and from this tourist trap here, that tacky souvenir shop there, the even tackier “attraction” over there, and sit yourself down for a moment of stillness as the throng of tour groups rushes past and around you the way the tour boats plough through the stillness of the bucolic canals.
London stride

April 1, 2026

London isn’t a city you can just “do”. It is just too vast. A day in London can only reveal the smallest details of this incomprehensibly multidimensional place, and the bad news is that not even a lifetime of London would capture the whole story. Today I decided to take the plunge, but I did the sensible thing and chose a very specific route from an authoritative guidebook. So it’s off to Trafalgar Square and we’ll be trying to follow the pages of Touring London by W. Teignmouth Shore. (Batsford, £2.25).

According to Teignmouth Shore “Trafalgar Square is one of the most beautiful and historically interesting places in London“. In fact WTS (we’re using an acronym) likes it so much it’s the starting point of all four tours in the book. We’re going to sample a few parts of two of them.

But there is very good reason to start here; the streets that radiate out from here will in short time lead you off to some of the most famous landmarks in the world – Big Ben, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square – while right here on the northern edge stands the National Gallery. St Paul’s Cathedral is a bit more of a trek but theoretically doable by striding off down the Strand.

And there’s one world-famous landmark I left off the list. Trafalgar Square itself, of course.

“The tall pillar in front of you” WTS tells us “is the Nelson Monument, which the guide books tell us is 184 feet and 11 inches high, including the statue, which much feel a bit undignified being mast-headed like this.” A bit of a one, this tour guide, he’s got (it is a “he”) a touch of the cheery cussedness you’d expect of yer old-school London cabbie. Except a lot posher. Anyway there it is, Nelson’s Column.

This area was originally the royal mews, established in the 1200s. But Britain’s victory over France and Spain at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 was such a seismic naval triumph, one which would establish Britain as the world’s supreme naval power for the next hundred years, that the nation demanded a fitting memorial for Admiral Nelson, who won the battle but famously lost his life onboard HMS Victory just as the ref was blowing the final whistle (never has the idea of “injury time” felt so poignant).

Nelson, the four monumental lions, the grand square, have been at the centre of British public life since the work was completed in the mid-19th century. Celebrations, demonstrations, commemorations, all have found such a focus here over nearly two hundred years now that it feels like the open, beating heart of London, England, Britain. Even without the events there’s always a throng of visitors, but there’s enough space for everyone in this magnificent square.

“The church on your left hand is St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, which it once actually was, where hereabouts it was mostly country-side, fields and lanes, green grass and flowers“. Those fields WTS is talking about were the fields that separated the two cities that came to form the core of the great city we know today, the City of London (Roman, trading, later business and finance) and the City of Westminster (post-Roman, royal palaces and political power). Today the two are separate boroughs within Greater London, and the City of London still of course retains its own Lord Mayor (and also virtually all of the country’s money. Well it feels like it). We’ll be heading further into Westminster in a moment. First let’s pop inside this lovely 18th century church.

St Martin’s-in-the-Fields makes a charming, quiet escape from the hustle of London outside. It is a little austere though, and apart from the occasional war memorial the most interesting thing is the font. Older than the current church, WTS says that “Francis Bacon, John Hampden, Charles II, and other worthies and unworthies” were baptised in it, although I can’t corroborate that online at this point. Charles II might be a fair shout; this is after all the parish church of the British royal family.

A famous church whose simple, functional design inspired a whole genre of Protestant church architecture throughout the British Empire, the church is also famous for the concert space in its crypt and its charity work with the homeless (although I think that WTS might be a little out of date in saying “you will find the crypt here open as a night shelter for the homeless“.)

On the other side of the Column there’s an interesting statue of Charles I. Well not so much the statue – I was supposed to have given up on statues, wasn’t I? – but what it replaced.

In 1290 Eleanor of Castille, the “greatly loved wife of Edward I“, died in Lincoln aged 49. Edward was so heartbroken that he ordered a stone cross built at every stopping place of her funeral procession down to Westminster. The last cross was on this spot, then known as Charing – hence Charing Cross.

Well, the Puritans didn’t share Edward’s grief and tore down the Charing cross, and after the Restoration up went a statue of their most-famous victim. As history moved on, Charing Cross became more known for the fact that six thoroughfares ran through this point, and in the 19th century this spot became the point from which all distances from London are measured from

Err, hang on, you might be asking, what about Charing Cross train station? Isn’t there an Eleanor Cross outside of that?

Well, yes. And no.

A major London terminus serving south-east London and Kent, Charing Cross station lies on the Strand a few hundred metres from, ahem, Charing Cross. Opened in 1864, at the height of the rapaciously-competitive railway boom, the railway people decided to publicise their links to such an historic part of London by building a new Eleanor Cross. (They could hardly stick up a second dirty great big Nelson’s Column outside the left luggage facilities, could they). So the one you see outside the station isn’t the original and it’s not even the reference point for distances from London. Worth making the point if you’d had the wrong idea all this time (I certainly had the wrong idea for a while, and I might have had that wrong idea right up to this trip today…)

Certainly Touring London was no help at all on the matter, so while we’re headed towards Whitehall let’s see if there are any general tips WTS can give us about getting the best out of a stay in the metropolis.

Getting about

“By far the most pleasant and most profitable way to travel London is to walk it…” which I would agree with in any city or town, even in London – as long as you have a particular route in mind and a particular neighbourhood you want to experience. It’s too big otherwise.

If you want to go further, or come from outside, what are the options?

“If you have your own car, no more need be said; you are able to go when and where you will.“

Definite no-no WTS, sorry, central London is a nightmare to drive in, and that’s before congestion charging comes into the picture.

“Next best is to hire a taxi-cab, which will probably work out less costly than hiring a car from your hotel“

…ok let’s forget transport. (I didn’t even get to ask him about the Oyster card)

Entertainment

London is one of the most vibrant, pulsating cities in the world, up there with New York when it comes to theatre, cinemas, live music, nightclubs, bars, and food from every nation on the planet. Isn’t that right WTS?

“The amusements of London are much of a muchness with those of other big cities”.

Ah ok.

Next time I’m going to go travelling with ChatGPT. Much better company.

“Theatrical entertainments are plentiful, something to suit every liking…the play is the thing at each theatre, and you can make your choice of musical shows, melodramas, comedies, farces: occasionally a new piece by a famous writer or the revival of an old one by a dead-and-goner.“

Maybe he’ll cheer up when it comes to food.

Eating out

WTS has a few recommendations about Italian and French restaurants “in that curious quarter of London called Soho”, but this blog isn’t big enough to list all the options out there. To be honest, I could just do with a takeaway egg fried rice or a biryani, nothing fancy really.

Ah.

“Warning; at any rate with ladies do not patronise a Chinese or other Oriental restaurant, without first assuring yourself that it is reputable.“

Not exactly Lonely Planet is it?

Well I suppose that’s not surprising. Maureen and Tony Wheeler launched Lonely Planet in 1973.

Batsford Books published Touring London in the spring of 1930…

Oh good, we’re now on Whitehall.

The Banqueting House is all that remains of Whitehall Palace, “the great palace built there by Cardinal Wolsey, who discreetly handed it over to his master, Henry VIII”. Today Whitehall is government, ministries, civil service, war memorials, crowds of tourists trying to photograph the mounted Horse Guards without spooking them. The guards and the horses never seem to lose their heads. Charles I wasn’t so lucky in the Banqueting House in 1649.

“Downing Street, where since 1735 Prime Ministers have come and gone. Queer stories its walls could tell, making some and marring other reputations.” If only WTS could have written a new edition ninety years later.

The Cenotaph, “erected to the memory of British citizens who died in the Great War. It has a dignified simplicity too often lacking in British memorials“.

Sadly, there would be other wars, other deaths, that would need to be commemorated here. And tragically for WTS’s London, the first and most catastrophe of those wars would begin just nine years after Touring London was published.

Whitehall runs into Parliament Square. Incredibly I took no close-up photos of the Houses of Parliament, but I think you know what it looks like. Instead I followed WTS, just as he was getting increasingly stroppy…

“The big open space is Parliament Square, as stupidly misused in the way of statuary as are most of the open places of London”. WTS only had time for this replica of a statue of Abraham Lincoln, “close by the Middlesex Town Hall” nowadays the UK Supreme Court (free to enter and somewhere I’ll pop in next time).

Fortunately WTS couldn’t include the famous statue of Churchill in his hit-list of “dreadful” statues as it’s post-war. Otherwise the right-wing press and social media would probably have had him sent to the Tower.

Over the road to Westminster Abbey, which was too busy for me to fancy popping in.

According to WTS, “What can I say? The less said the better”. For goodness sake man! …hang on…

“My advice is this; if you cannot spend many hours here, be content with gaining a general impression of its almost overwhelming beauty.”

I was last in Westminster Abbey many many years ago, but I don’t really think I appreciated the history and the architecture then. If a really hard-to-please critic such as WTS was in raptures over it, it’s a must-(re)visit. And the huge queue to get in is its own recommendation.

The Houses of Parliament is apparently “a mass of sham Gothic” though.

From there I headed up the Embankment and up the Strand, but those photos and observations are for another day. I was left pretty cream-crackered at the end, and not just trying to match Touring London’s advice to the modern city. So I’ll be revisiting from time to time, maybe heading eastwards into spaces where I imagine the Luftwaffe and the planners would have really swept away the world that Teignmouth Shore would have written about.

After all, it’s not much of a trip for me, doing London again, and again. It’s my city.

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