London’s Harwood Arms

The closest London Underground stop to the Harwood Arms is West Brompton.   The Harwood Arms is a pub.  Ruth and I were determined to eat here because the Harwood Arms is no ordinary British pub.  It’s Michelin rated and has a chef, Sally Abé, with a growing reputation.  The Harwood Arms specialty is game.

Sally Abé began her career as a chef at London’s Savoy grill before moving on to Gordon Ramsey’s Claridges for 2 years.  Next she was sous chef at a 2-Michelin-starred restaurant called The Ledbury.  She has been at The Harwood Arms for 1½ years and is married to Matt Abé, chef de cuisine at Restaurant Gordon Ramsey.  Why she is enhancing her culinary skills as Head Chef at a historic pub was something of a mystery to me.  However, I think I found a clue in a comment she made on thestaffcanteen.com.  “I spend a lot of time looking at old English recipe books and I try to find old recipes to bring into the modern day.”  Expect Sally to eventually move on.  In the meantime, if you happen to have a meal overseen by her at The Harwood Pub, you will be in culinary heaven.

Because we are not especially gamesome, Ruth and I ordered sole for our lunch/dinner.  Accompanying it were the best potatoes and bread I have ever eaten.  Ruth decided to splurge and have dessert.  The photo of it above speaks for itself.  Elisabeth, The lady who took care of us while we dined, pointed to a man sitting at the bar and told us that he eats his mid-day meal every day at the Harwood Arms and returns every evening for dinner.  I fully understand this loyalty.

My Fodor’s travel book noted, “British game doesn’t get much better than….at this game lover’s paradise”, which is this city’s only Michelin-starred-gastro-pub off Fulham Broadway.  The book’s entry goes on to rave about its game-based dishes like haunch of Berkshire roe deer…and Muggleswick grouse, which made me certain that Ruth and I missed the opportunity of a lifetime to sample historic British pub cuisine.  We blew it by ordering the wrong but decidedly delicious things.  harwoodarms.com reports, “We strive to use as much wild food as possible as we believe sustainability is of utmost importance”.  Websites are as full of praise concerning the food at The Harwood Arms as I am.

For its 10th anniversary as a gastropub in May, 2019, Sally worked with 3 former head chefs to create a 7-course tasting menu that reflected the every day food at this atypical pub.  I’m sure the man who dines there twice every day attended this occasion!

Hank

Wales Today

In 1801 the population of Cardiff, Wales, was 1,860.   Now it’s Wales capital city and the metro area has about half a million people.  Wales only other urban area is Swansea.  Its population is about half of Cardiff’s.  It was granted city status by the current Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth’s son Charles, in 1969.  Both cities are worth visiting although you won’t hear much Welsh spoken in either place.

Ruth and I spent far too much time on the Gower Peninsula west of Swansea, so we only had time for one city attraction.  I opted for the National Waterfront Museum on the Swansea Marina expecting it to be about this city’s venerable shipping industry, which was impressively big in the the 19th century when coal was king and “the finest power source of the steam era”.  It was an interesting museum and free but not about Swansea’s waterfront.  It was about the past 300 years of Welsh industry and innovation and was officially opened in 2005 by Queen Elizabeth as part of a family of 7 museums around this country within a country that tell its work story.  Three others are the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, the Big Pit:  National Coal Museum at Blaenafon, and the National Wool Museum in Dre-Fach Felindre.

I admired the National Waterfront Museum’s candor.   Its signage reported, “Thousands of people once worked in the mining, quarrying, and manufacturing industries in Wales.” It celebrated Sir Pryce Pryce Jones, a pioneer of the mail order industry who died in 1920, and said honestly that “Oil overtook coal as the main source of energy” in the mid 1950s and that the last recession of the 20th century devastated Wales.  Its 15 themed galleries were mostly about past glory.  One brochure challenged visitors to “Discover how Wales was a world leader in the production of metals throughout the Industrial Revolution.” I only found 3 displays about currently viable Welsh industries:  Corgi toys, a Royal Mint, and Spectrum.  Spectrum Technologies in Bridgend is a leader in laser wire and UV cable marking technology, and it customers include Airbus, Lockheed Martin, GE Aviation, and Boeing.  While we were in Wales, Ford announced the closing of its Bridgend engine plant in 2020 with the loss of 1,700 jobs.

This museum experience begins with 2 red vehicles.  The one above was once a Danish 3-wheeler and is called the Welsh Mouse.  It received a certificate from Shell for getting 568 mpg.  The one below was once manufactured in Wales.  A lot of children apparently visit this museum.  The art they leave behind is mostly about how beautiful Wales is, not its powerful economy.

Hank

PS  The monoplane above in the National Waterfront Museum dates from the early 20th century and is considered one of the oldest British aircraft in existence.

Cruising

The world is rapidly changing.  Shock #1.  For about the past month, more than half of the viewers of my blog live in Hong Kong.  This huge increase in viewers from one Asian city is welcomed but unexplainable.

The next several shocks occurred yesterday as I was reading the June 8, 2019, The Economist, which I have found to be a trustworthy publication.  In 2016 the Chinese overtook Germans to become the 2nd biggest cruise-going nation.  I would have thought the United States was #1.  However, Chinese cruisers are now in decline and their numbers are expected to drop 5 to 15% this year.

Shock #3.  Chinese travel tastes, especially related to cruises, are changing.  When Chinese citizens are asked why they take cruises, it’s learned that their expressed interests are shifting.   “Visit landmarks and shopping have been dethroned as top reasons for traveling,” claims The Economist.  Earlier this year in Sydney, Australia, Ruth and I were about to spend our last night in a hotel after a month Down Under.  On the way to our room we were accompanied by a hotel employee who was cleaning them.  Curiously, she was carrying many boxes that had once clearly contained designer products. The names on them were Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Cartier, etc.  Ruth asked her about them and was told that Chinese visitors to Australia usually spend 40 to 50 thousand dollars on designer goods that they put on and wear to return home.  The boxes get left in their hotel rooms.  She asked Ruth if she wanted some of them, and Ruth returned home with a prestigious but empty couple of them.  According to The Economist, taking a break from work and experiencing local cultures have replaced shopping as the prime Chinese reasons to travel.  Cruise lines are paying attention and changing on-board potential purchases.  The article is called “not what it was”.

Shock #4, 5, and 6!  Indians now gobble up nearly 3 times as much data on their phones as Americans.  Most of the next 2 billion users of the internet will be from what we used to call 3rd world countries.  That’s 2 BILLION!  China and India will lead this boom.  As a result Google is shifting its thinking to building products for India, already a huge user of both Facebook and YouTube.  “A lot of Indians use phones to look at pornography…”  The Economist observes in an article named “A global timepass economy”.

It appears that the people of Hong Kong are suddenly very curious about U. S. and international travel that does not involve shopping for expensive brand names, and it’s only a matter of time before Indians shop on their phones, adding to the global cardboard crisis.

Hank

 

 

Destination Winchcombe

Winchcombe was once the capital of the Anglo-Saxon Mercia.   Today it’s a quiet, varied town in the Cotswolds with slightly less than 5,000 residents that is definitely worth seeing.  A bit too large to be called a village, it has 3 must-see attractions: St. Peter’s Church, Sudeley Castle and the town itself, which is eminently strollable.  The church is on the main street, which changes names at least 4 times as it passes through town, as is a lively visitors center.  The castle is up a hill but a relatively easy and delightful walk from town.   There are 2 other attractions that largely depend on your interests.  The town museum’s specialty is an international collection of police uniforms and equipment.  The Gloucestershire and Warwickshire steam railway is less than a mile from Winchcombe and promises a 25-mile intro to The Cotswolds.  Getting to Winchcombe from several nearby towns is easy.  Ruth and I traveled there from Cheltenham via a local bus and returned after dinner in a historic pub.

St. Peter’s is quite ancient looking.  There has been a church on this site since about the 9th century.  The current one was built between 1452 an 1462 and has some unique features, like musket holes from the 1643 Civil War.  A female Shakespeare relative was buried in its cemetery.  They are not called gargoyles, but there are more than 3 dozen “groteques” decorating St. Peter’s exterior.  Their identities are often unknown, but many appear to have been town citizens in the 15th century, like the man wearing a fetching top hat.  The work of 60 different masons has been documented on the inside and outside of this church, and about 1/3 of them helped to construct Sudeley Castle.  

St. Peter’s interior is worth seeing too.  The most interesting stained glass window depicts a ship and was commissioned by a 19th century naval chaplain.  It relates a famous biblical story from the New Testament involving Jesus Christ.

Sudeley is the only private castle in England that has a queen buried on its grounds.  She was Katherine Parr, the 6th and last wife of Henry VIII.  Seeing her home and Winchcome are both good ideas.

Hank

Using Bethlehem Steel’s Plant

The steel plant in Bethlehem, PA, closed in 1995.  The coke works shut down 3 years later. This behemoth mill was 4½ miles long.  As it became more and more derelict, this town looked for ways to repurpose it.  Several solutions were tried.  For example, 3 years ago a 1913 electrical repair shop became the National Museum of Industrial History.  Was it a good idea to create a museum to preserve and show America’s industrial heritage?  The Smithsonian apparently thought so and became an affiliate.  Still, would travelers be interested in looking at a couple of hundred industrial artifacts celebrating 4 industries that thrived in this area?  This question remains unanswered.  Personally, I found it a 4 Compass operation because an enthusiastic woman named Susan showed Ruth and me around, and she knew how to interest us.  Truthfully, If we had toured the National Museum of Industrial History on our own, we would have spent less than an hour there and would not aspire to return.

The industries that are thoroughly explored in this facility include iron and steel, silk, and propane.  It begins with Machinery Hall.  Sound interesting?  Then go, but opt for a guided tour.  Machinery Hall tells the story of American industrial strength that was celebrated in 1886’s Centennial Exposition.   Iron and Steel acknowledges the primary industry that made this area an international power… until 1995.  I did not know that PA’s Lehigh Valley once contained a silk industry of national importance.  Propane?  Yawn.

Machinery Hall is mostly a showcase for the large machines that were displayed in the Centennial Exposition.  Held in Philadelphia to celebrate the United States’ 100th birthday, it attracted 37 participating countries and had 10,000,000 visitors to see the 8,000 machines displayed–engines, pumps, boilers, and turbines that meant lots of machine-made goods for a growing powerhouse of a nation.  The Smithsonian was the source for most of the large, once state-of-the-art machines that the exposition visitors ogled.

The Bethlehem Iron Company’s first successful venture was producing wrought-iron rails for a growing national railroad network just before the Civil War.   Eight years after the war ended, this company that had 5 names over time, began making Bessemer Steel that produced rails lasting 6 times longer and carrying heavier loads.  New York’s art deco Chrysler Building contains 20,291 tons of Bethlehem H-beams and is still the tallest brick building in the world.  Susan told us that Charles M. Schwab was the King of Steel.  When I told her I knew nothing about him, she suggested that I read a book called Forging America.  Ruth got reengaged when Susan told us that 25,000 women did 53 types of jobs for Bethlehem Steel during World War II as it made 1,127 ships for the war effort.

The silk section was the most interesting to me because I knew nothing about this American industry.  Susan, a big silk fan, was especially animated as she explained this part of the museum that contained a huge once locally used Jacquard loom.  She told us that Alexander Hamilton established Patterson, NJ as America’s Silk City, that immigrant silk workers asked for more money in 1880 that the silk magnets refused to pay, and that Allentown still has a silk mill.

Even Susan was starting to fade as she tried to make propane, a fuel that was once burned off as waste, come alive as a major museum subject.   She spent less time telling us about the local American Gasol Company, which became the star of this new industry.

The National Museum of Industrial History now has a temporary show called “Don’t Touch That Dial”, which celebrates 100 years of radio, until November 3, 2019.  One of its cleverer touches is its entry tickets.  They are time cards that visitors punch in with.

 

Hank