Claires 40th. An Album.

It was my niece, Claires, 40th birthday party last weekend. She lives in Cambridge with husband Scott and her 6 year old daughter, Ellie. To mark the occasion she invited family and friends to a party at University Centre, Cambridge:

It was great to meet and chat pre disco, and then to watch the revels on the dance floor until 11.30. I don’t have any pictures of the party, but this is myself and Claire pre-party:

It being June it was light outside until after 9pm. This is what it looked like outside. The University Centre is the modern building on the right.

Or, if you want a more traditional view, this what it looked like behind the camera. The river is the River Cam.

Cambridge is a pretty expensive place to stay if you want stay in the centre. For example, the hotel nearest to this spot (The Hilton) would cost you £318.00 for this Saturday night. One night. No breakfast. So I stayed at the IBIS hotel next to the station, just over a mile away at £144.00 for a Saturday night. Bargain!

The IBIS hotel is a new building and overlooks a newly built Station Square with lots of other new buildings all around it. The only old building is the station building itself, a modest nineteenth century building with arches, which looks like this when you are looking across the square out of the window of Pret a Manger:

The next day, Sunday, I took the train into London to visit an open studio occasion of Gail Brodholt, print maker. Her studio is in Woolwich where she creates her lino cut prints. The trains from Cambridge to London are hourly on Sundays and it takes 45 minutes to cover a 60 mile journey. To drive, the same journey would take twice as long at about 90 minutes. The trains are typically 12 carriages long, and on this particular Sunday both of the trains I travelled on, there and back, were full. Just the odd unfortunate traveller standing.

Everywhere I went on this jaunt was very busy. I still half expect the UK to be like it used to be into the 1970’s when everything closed down on Sundays and people stayed at home. Definitely not anymore.

My trip from Central London to Woolwich took me via North Greenwich tube station concourse where I snapped this unlikely event. It was well underway, with diners listening to music and shouting with delight while suspended from some enormous cranes. Crackers. Imagine if had started to rain! (It didn’t).

Print buying done I returned to the IBIS hotel. This is part of the hotel facade looking onto to the Station Square. I took the picture on Monday morning to show the unassuming pedestrian entrance to the station bicycle park. The black sqaure on the bottom right hand side of the building is actually the entrance to a large cycle parking facility.

Intrigued, I entered, and was amazed to find there were two levels of parking for bikes. Each level has a mezannine level, so four levels,  and it accomodates almost 3,000 bikes.

The Station bike facility appears to have been hugely successful. The old bike parking facility could only accommodate about 850 bikes when it was replaced by this in 2016. A quick assessment at 9.30 on Monday morning concluded that the place was already almost full. This is a wonderful thing. Fewer cars and more bikes make cities much more liveable.

On Monday I met an old friend in London for a luchtime saunter around old haunts when we lived in and around Balham and Clapham in the 1970’s. A wonderful nostalgia trip with an unexpected 20 degrees and sunshine to top it off. No more information or pictures available about this!

Then this: The 15.33 LNER service from London Kings Cross Station to Leeds on one of the new Hitachi Azuma trains that are gradually replacing the 40 year old Inter City trains on the East Coast Main Line.

Isn’t that station roof just ‘the business’?!!

The End.