#map geek

Me, watching the Agents of SHIELD season finale:

“FREEZE IT!”

(stares)

The original pier at Southwold was built in 1900 and was 810ft long but it was struck by a sea-mine during World War II and its weakened state caused it to be washed away by storms over subsequent years, reducing it to a length of only 60ft. Thankfully, the pier was rescued and rebuilt in 2001 as Britain’s only 21st Century Pier. It now boasts 623ft of leisure, food and entertainment facilities. When you arrive at Southwold pier you’ll find plenty of parking to the left of the entrance. The huge carpark is pay-and-display but isn’t extortionate prices. Alternatively, there are lots of free parking spaces along the seafront but these get filled up pretty quickly in the morning and visitors tend to stay all day. Public toilets are available in the car park area and a couple of loos can be found on the pier inside the arcade too. But that’s enough housekeeping – on to the fun! The attraction that I enjoyed the most was The Under The Pier Show. Despite it’s name, it is above deck and contains a host of weird and wacky penny arcade machines. The ‘show’ allows you to step into the mind of automaton artist Tim Hunkin, where you can experience the world through the eyes of a fly, take a holiday in your vintage armchair and check out what’s lurking beneath the Southwold sea in the diving machine. Some of the games are as little as 20p a go, and often provide a souvenir such as a deranged doctor’s prescription, a psychic prediction or even a nuclear sweet. The machines on display are regularly are rotated and new games are added all the time so you can never be sure that you’ll find there, but they range from walking a zimmer-frame across a busy road to shooting artwork in a gallery, from having your feet checked by a crazy chiropodist to an instant solar eclipse. What you’ll see on the day is totally pot-luck but you can guarantee it’ll be fun, weird and wonderful.

The next stop on my tour of the pier was The Clockhouse café, serving barista coffee and an amazing hot chocolate (which I thoroughly enjoyed!). Again the prices are not too steep and definitely compare favourably to coffee chain prices! The Waterclock on the pier outside the café is another Tim Hunkin invention which ‘performs’ every 30 minutes so be sure to hang around for this, it’s worth a watch! The clock was designed as a feature about water recycling and all the copper on the clock has been reclaimed from old hot water cylinders so it’s a great lesson in recycling for the little ones too. With the school summer holiday’s coming up, it’s a great place to entertain the children without spending a fortune on a day out. For a start, the arcades still have 2p machines! As a child, I remember saving all my 2 pence pieces in a jar throughout the year to play on the arcade machines during our summer holiday. It made the build-up to the trip so exciting and, even though we only ever won more 2ps back, it was great fun and we could spend hours playing on the machines! Perhaps you too could encourage your little ones to save some change over the next few weeks to take with them to the pier? There are lots of different versions of 2p games on the pier and the larger games are not too pricey either.

Of course, a trip to the seaside wouldn’t be complete without fish and chips! There are a few different options if you wish to eat on the pier; The Boardwalk restaurant serves proper restaurant food with fresh fish and platters, while The Beach Cafe dishes up traditional fish and chips in cute little newpaper-print trays. Preferring to eat on the beach rather than the pier, Hubby and I picked up some scampi, fishcake and chips from a nearby chip shop and enjoyed it with the view of the pier in the background. After dinner, we went for a stroll along the promenade to view the gorgeous – and highly priced! – beach huts at Southwold and picked up an ice-cream from the Sweet Treats store at the front of the pier for our dessert. The day was so hot that my whippy ice-cream (£2 with a flake, £1.70 without) quickly started to melt down my hand so I took a quick snap of it before tucking in. 

  The promenade at Southwold is ideal for an after-dinner stroll and the beautiful views make me really want to own a beach hut and spend days painting and writing by the sea. Even on a bad-weather day the views along the coast are spectacular and Southwold’s lighthouse is a gorgeous feature on the horizon. There are even more attractions on the pier that I’ve not mentioned, including quaint little shops selling homewares, postcards, toys and traditional bucket-and-spade items, and another interesting Hunkin invention at the very end of the pier; the “Quantum Tunnelling Telescope” but I’ll let you investigate these other attractions for yourself!

I really enjoyed the day out at Southwold and would definitely recommend it for fun day out at the coast. Let me know if you take a trip there this summer and please get in touch with your photos, I’d love to see what you got up to so tweet me a photo to @Cassiefairy.

The influence of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts tradition on Gill’s work was evident through the hand lettered calligraphy and minutely detailed artwork of each map. There are so many elements within each piece that it was hard to see it all, and I didn’t want to drag myself away until I’d read every fact and spotted every ‘joke’ image within the map. Many of his maps poked fun at new technologies and world-wide progress. Having been born in the Victorian era of horse-and-carts Max Gill would make comment on new developments by including comic images alongside the detail of the map; such as a broken-down bus being pushed by its passengers when motor transport was introduced, which I am sure would have made his fellow Victorians roar with laughter when they came across it while studying the map. In 1920 a magazine reviewer said of Gill “He is always looking at things from a queer angle, but in the most natural manner in the world without affectation. There is a sort of jolly exuberance about all the work of this notable artist-craftsman.”

Wonderground Map image at MacDonaldGill.com

One of Gill’s most famous maps was the Wonderground Map of London Town which was a decorative version of the London tube map. It was commissioned by Frank Pick of the London Underground as ‘entertainment’ for passengers and, when it appeared on underground station platforms in 1914, commuters regularly missed their trains because they were too engrossed in the comedy of the map! Can you imagine that happening today?! The maps that I studied most during my visit to the exhibition were Gill’s collection of tea maps. He helped to promote the British tea-drinking habit by creating a series of maps showing where tea is grown and how its popularity has spread throughout the world. The facts on this map fascinated me and I photographed a few parts of the map so that I could look back at it when I got home. It reminded me of a map of Lancashire that I’d been sent by the Lancashire Tea brand after collecting tokens on their boxes of teabags – I’ll have to dig this out and show you it soon!

I really enjoyed the exhibition and I’m so please that we popped into the Lettering Arts Centre that day. The talk about Max Gill’s life really stuck with me and I’m pleased that I took some photos at the time so that I could recount the exhibition to you today. At the time I didn’t even know I was a map geek, let alone admit to it and have a regular feature on my blog!

Map geek – Globes around the house

Globetrotter sounds so cool. How come there’s no such thing as a map-trotter? Sounds a bit piggy doesn’t it?? Anyway, as well as taking a keen interest in maps (so much so that I started this regular blog feature!) I also love globes.

globe collection

As much as I enjoy studying a world map, terrestrial globes are the only ‘true’ world maps as they show the earth as it really is, without…

Map Geek – Going into the map

Do you remember that episode of Friends where the Chandler and Joey are tourists in London and Joey has to ‘go into the map’ in order to get his bearings? He put the map on the floor and stepped onto it to work out what direction to head in, even though he’d only just left the hotel. I’m not saying that I’ve ever done this before, but I haveturned the map while following the route, and I’m sure…