A Boxing Day Walk

 I did it in high summer* - left Shrewsbury behind and headed for the hills one glorious day when the sun was shining and Shropshire's hedgerows were heavy with wild roses beneath a cloudless sky.  Now on a similarly bright day, albeit cold and wintery, I've done it again, and to the same hills too. 

Here - leaving behind queues on Pride Hill for the Boxing Day sales [already in place by 6.00am, would you believe], the Severn bursting its banks, and flood defences up on Frankwell Quay - is my Boxing Day walk.  Shropshire is a county rich with beauty. Shrewsbury is only one jewel in its crown, and the Long Mynd is another. See what I mean:

*PS. Here's that high summer post

Has Shrewsbury Ever Looked More Beautiful Than It Does Today?

I had something else in mind to write about today, but what a beautiful day it is. After the storm that hit so much else of the country - though thankfully not Shrewsbury, at least with its full 100 mile per hour force - how can I not marvel at this morning's clear blue skies and crystal russets and golds. A perfect day for celebrating the beauty of our town in autumn.   

Here's this morning's dog walk then, heading through St Alkmund's churchyard, down Fish Street, across the top of the Cop, up Belmont Bank [the home of monster spiders], round Old St Chad's Churchyard, through the Square, across High Street and back home via Butcher Row, St Alkmond's Square and St Mary's Church.  I'm not claiming much for my photography [iPhone], but the views speak for themselves:

 

As if that's not enough loveliness for one day, here's this afternoon's dog walk too. The sun was still shining, so Biffo and I decided what better place than the Quarry [our local park]. Half way across it, we stopped off to admire the Dingle, which to my mind is even more beautiful in shades of green and gold than in its high summer colours. Then we cut over Porthill Bridge by the Boathouse pub, up Beck's Field to the top of the hill [to admire the town's spires and domes beneath a bright blue sky], then along the swollen Severn, over Kingsland Bridge, up Swan Hill and through the bustling lanes and passages that lead back home:

 

I wish I could have captured more of the essence of what today has been like. I can't remember any  occasion, no matter how special, when Shrewsbury has looked more beautiful than it does today. 

Britannia of Blome & Britain in Bloom

How about this as a description of Shrewsbury:

“The Severn is navigabale to Schrosbery, I passed it over a large stone ridge.  At the entrance there is a suburb, the church of which appears to me to have formerly belonged to some fine abbey.  

I ascended from thence to the town ; which is mounted on the platform of a rock, scarped on almost every side, which renders its situation naturally strong.  Besides which, the wall that encloses it made it difficult to be scaled.  

The environs consist of large woods, and high mountains.  Nevertheless, the town is filled with people and rich shopkeepers, who dwell in two large streets, one leading to the market-place, and the other turning from this place towards the left.  Near which are the Great Church, the Exchange and Town-hall.  

They are in a street called Aystrit, which is so broad, that it seems a long market-place, terminating at one of the ends of the town, where stands the Castle and commands it ; being more elevated and by so much the stronger, as it is environed on one side by broad ditches, closed with good walls, and on the other there is no approach to it, on account of the steepness of the rock. But it has been ruined by the late wars, insomuch that, excepting a few towers, and some lodgings within, I see nothing remarkable.”

This piece of seventeenth century travel writing was published in Paris in 1672, recounting the travels of a certain Monsieur Jorevin de Rocheford.  Also included are details of Shrewsbury funeral ceremonies that I’ll share with you another time. The painting above provides an idea of the view that M de Rocheford would have encountered as he approached Shrewsbury, and so would the writer of this account, also written in the seventeenth century.

 “For largeness [numbring five parish churches, besides a chapel ; two of which, St Marie’s and St. Alckmond’s, are fair structures, and beautified with lofty spires,] neatness of buildings, both publick and private, largeness and variety of streets, and populousness, [the town] may be ranged in the number of cities of the first rank.

“It is a town of good strength, as well by nature as by art ; being fenced about with a strong wall ; besides another bulwark ranging from the Castle unto, and in part along, the Severn ; through which there are here entrances into the town: on the East and West, by two fair stone bridges, with gates, towers, and barrs : and on the North by a strong gate, over which is mounted the said Castle, once exceedingly strong.

“It is a place of a great resort, and well inhabited both by the English and the Welsh, who speak both speeches: and enjoyeth a great trade for cloths, cottons, frizes and a variety of other commoditie s: this being the common mart between England and Middle Wales.”

Both these accounts I've taken out of The History of Shrewsbury, Volume I, written by H. Own and J.B. Blakeway, published in 1825 – which I bought in first edition only the other day from the completely wonderful Candle Lane Books, which I shall be writing more about later in the year. The second account was lifted by them from the ‘Britannia of Blome’, which struck me as being of passing interest as today is Britain in Bloom finals Day, with the town of Shrewsbury full of similar jollifications to the ones I described recently for the Regional Finals.

The names may be similar, however, but the similarity ends as soon as it begins. Britannia of Blome is a “geographical description of the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the isles and territories thereto belonging : and ... an alphabetical table of the names, titles, and seats of the nobility and gentry ... Illustrated with a map of each county of England and Wales, enobled with illustrations… the like never before seen”.

Richard Blome was active as a map and bookseller in latter part of seventeenth century.  The Britannia was his principle work, though it was described by some as plagiarism, and said to include poorly drawn and sketch maps. 

I have to say these maps don’t look sketchy to me.  Above is one of Shropshire, and I love this one of London.  And, while we're on the subject of engravings, below is one from the Owen & Blakeway History - a lovely stormy view, appropriate to some of the weather we've been having recently, drawn by J.C. Buckley in 1823:

One final word on the subject of the painting of Shrewsbury with which I began this post.  It was donated to Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery in December 2009 and will be one of the treasures on show in the new Museum.  It dates back to around 1630, and is the third oldest known image of the town.

Coincidentally, it turns out that a previous owner of the painting was the same Reverend John Brickdale Blakeway [vicar of St Mary’s from 1794 until his death in 1826], who co-wrote the History of Shrewsbury. In that History, mention is made of the additional storey on the tower of the Abbey Church, which was depicted ‘in an old painting of a view of Shrewsbury’.  As the Blakeway painting - which is believed to have hung in The Council House, which is where Blakeway lived and died - is the only known view of the town showing this feature, it’s more than likely that this is the 'old painting' mentioned in the book.  

How wonderful it is to think that some of Shrewsbury's old treasures have survived and, as in this case, will soon be available for us to see.

By the way, good luck to Shrewsbury’s Britain in Bloom bid. When I hear how it goes, I’ll let you know.  

 

At My Window With A Broken Wing

Do you recognize the quote?  If you do, odds are that you belong to a certain generation, one for which the words of Bob Dylan speak for a surprising number of situations.

When I awoke yesterday morning,  here in my little house in the heart of Shrewsbury, I found a bird on my window sill. Upon closer examination, he wasn’t the raven of Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero, No Limit’ [well, to be honest I could see that straight away], but neither was he an ordinary Shrewsbury bruiser of a pigeon.  He was too small and dainty - dove-grey with a slightly pinkish breast.  He had an air of dignity about him too - and that's not anything I've noticed in the local pigeon population.  No, whatever his species, this was a noble bird. You see what I mean by the way he holds his head. 

Later in the morning, setting up my bits and pieces of weaving equipment  on the front door step [so that I could take advantage of the sun whilst I worked] I discovered the bird down amongst the rose bushes.  The moment I brought out my big stripey sunshade, however, and opened it out, the 'raven' [I've decided to call him that out of deference to Dylan] fluttered up to perch in its shade on my railing, where it remained all day. 

One of the things I love about Shrewsbury is that immediately behind its main shopping streets, you'll find bees and flowers and every sort of bird from blue tits and dust-bathing sparrows to blackbirds who sing day and night, cormorants [down on the river ]and kingfishers - and now this tourist of a 'raven'.  I wonder what he makes of us all.  For most of yesterday, the two of us were only a foot or so away from  each other.  Occasionally I’d look up from weaving and there he would be, looking back at me.  I’d stop what I was doing and the two of us would take each other in.  I wondered what he saw.  I wondered what he was doing here. I wondered what had happened in his past to make him so comfortable with human company.  He didn’t look worried about anything. He didn't look sick.  His wings appeared to work. He hadn’t been shot.

At one point, wondering if he might be suffering from heat stroke, I brought out a bowl of water and put it down amongst the roses.  Then I broke up some bread and scattered it around.  The ‘raven’ ignored both.  Occasionally he would ruffle up his feathers, stand up, take a stretch, extend his neck, turn his head.  Then he would hunker down again.

At the start of my day's weaving, I worked quietly, afraid of startling a wild creature that had somehow lost its natural habitat.  But gradually I realized that sounds didn't  bother my 'raven'. Cars, radios, people walking, running, shouting as they passed – the most the ‘raven’ would do was occasionally peck its wings, as if pruning itself, but even then it didn’t look particularly bothered by the world around it.

Wouldn’t it be great if all wild birds were like that, and wild animals too – comfortable with our company, not startled by our presence, taking us in, happy to share their days with us, happy to do their own thing whilst we do ours, a companionable silence between us that speaks volumes for mutual respect?  Instead of which, no self-respecting wild bird or  creature will come within a mile of us, and the mere scent of a human sends them flapping and screeching off the other way.

In the evening the ‘raven’ dropped down to the rose bush, where I’d placed the water bowl, and flapped about. Then he flew up to where his day had started on my window sill.  His head went down, his feathers ruffled up and his neck disappeared into them.

That’s how I found him when I came downstairs today.  Still on the sill.  Eyes still open - but to all intents and purposes still asleep.  I made myself some coffee.  Cleared up last night’s meal.  When I looked again, the sun had risen over the rooftops and the ‘raven’ had gone.  Perhaps he had had the rest he needed and was heading home, like all those other tourists who come for a break to our beautiful old town and return home refreshed.

PS. In case you’re wondering, here’s Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero, No Limits, last verse:

 

The bridge at midnight trembles

The country doctor rambles

Bankers’ nieces seek perfection

Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring

The wind howls like a hammer

The night blows cold and rainy

My love she’s like some raven

At my window with a broken wing

La Vie en Rose, in Shrewsbury

I have roses on my mind. For a couple of weeks now, walking around Shrewsbury, their scents have been wafting towards me.  They're in the Dingle. They're in that Quarry bed up by the main gates. Crossing St Alkmund’s Square, I catch the scent of them and find as delicate a yellow rose as I’ve ever seen anywhere.  Next to it, I find a cluster of fluffy pink bush-roses on tiny, graceful stalks.  Then, passing St Julian’s, I look up to find flame-red climbers gracing the church wall.  Then on the convent wall, behind Old St Chad’s, I find blowsy pink roses nearly past their best, though with a few buds still to open out. 

By now I've reached the top of Belmont Bank. I stand still and  smell the roses but can’t figure out where their scent is coming from.  I look around.  Where are they?  I walk on, but still I can’t locate them.   

They talk about Shrewsbury being a town of flowers.  Some flowers I actively dislike [begonias to name just one] but I love it that in a busy town centre with cars passing by you can still stop at the scent of a rose and look around to see where it is.  Closer to home, I only have to open the gate into my daughter’s garden and it’s as if I’ve lifted the glass stopper on a bottle of perfume.  And even closer still, outside my own house, a rose bush my husband and I bought one year at the Shrewsbury Flower Show is spreading across our old brick wall, scattering its blooms like stars.  

I’ve been out this morning tying them back.  Is this a particularly good year for them, I wonder, or is it just that I’m noticing them more for some reason? I ask Joyce of Lulu Flowers, and she reckons it’s a good year, courtesy of all that rain.  I’m in her shop now, having a cup of tea, and it’s not just roses I can smell - it’s sweet peas too, and stock, sweet william and peonies. 

Joyce’s shop is full of smells, and on every side of me are beautiful blooms, velvet-red roses and snow-white ones, bright green shamrock crysanthemums, and pink, strangely plastic-looking anthurriums,  sweet-smelling freesias, flame-coloured Peruvian lilies - which Joyce describes as good ‘doers’, whatever that means - then stocks, huge pink peonies and a tumbling cascade of tiny purple flowers called lisianthus.

Joyce has had Lulu Flowers for five years now.  She sells vintage items as well as flowers - household items mostly, and they obviously bring in the trade because in the sort time it takes to drink my first cup of tea a couple of customers have come in for conversations with Joyce, either wanting to sell her or buy vintage items. 

Joyce came to floristry from working for a wholesaler importing carnations, and to that from gardening, and to gardening as an antidote to her life as a biker chick.  You think you know people, but so often you don’t.  I’ve been coming into Joyce’s shop since she took it on, but I’ve never seen the biker in her.  Yet here we are discussing Norton Commandos and Kawasaki ZL1000 [the Eliminator, in case you’re interested] and the bikes she and husband Terry keep in their enormous garage but no longer take out on the road. 

Joyce left Shrewsbury when she was young, thinking it had nothing to keep her here.  In her day she’s been a member of the all-girl bike group, the Amazons, and a biker rock chick in one of the big biker gangs.  Terry was in a biker gang as well, too, though he's not any more.  He’s a Shrewsbury man, but it was biking that brought him and Joyce together.

What happens to bikers when they give up the bikes, I want to know [buying flower shops, you have to admit, isn’t the first thing that comes to mind].  Joyce says she bought a nippy little Mazda - the RX8 - a bit like a go-kart is how she describes it.  ‘It has a rotary engine, massive horse-power and small CC,’ Joyce says.  'You had to know how to drive it.'  The last time Terry took it out, he succeeded in writing it off, putting on a performance of almost theatrical scale, skidding on the old A5 and ending up [though not ending up, if you see what I mean] in the cemetery, perched on a bank above a row of graves.

I thought I’d come in for a nice chat about roses, and here I am talking about engines, accidents and graves. And that’s the quiet part of Joyce’s life.  I’m beginning to get the feeling she has quite a story to tell.  Certainly, she admits, she had a tumultuous decade during her biker days, awash with accidents, injury and ill-health.  All of this started with her mother’s death when she was eighteen. It was that that loosened her connection with Shrewsbury.

Joyce is a Shrewsbury girl from a Shropshire and predominantly Shrewsbury background, and it means everything to her to have returned to her roots.  Her mum grew up in Astley, near Hadnall, and worked for Silhouette.  Her dad lived in Belle Vue.  His memories included cycling up Wyle Cop as a bakers’ boy, and working at the Lion Hotel as a hotel porter.  Joyce’s nan worked at the Gala bingo hall just down the road from where we are now, and her grandfather was a train driver in the days of steam.  Typically of Shrewsbury, she and Terry discovered when they got together that his dad had worked on the steam trains too – as stoker to Joyce’s grandfather. But then that's Shrewsbury for you. It’s a town whose roots go deep and wide.

Joyce first heard rumours on the Shrewsbury grapevine that Lulu Flowers might up for sale. Her father had died and she’d come into an inheritance. Suddenly it seemed to her that a floristry shop was just what she wanted.  Not only that, but an ex-colleague and talented florist, Sherlie Haycox [who has been at Lulu Flowers ever since] was looking for work too.

There was a magic moment when these things all came together.  Joyce describes it now as going mad. The shop came up, and she bought it.  She might have been to floristry college, but she’d no experience of running a business. However, she knew what she wanted, and  she knew that working for herself would suit a strong-willed person like herself, who had never been much good at taking instructions and liked to do things her own way. Liked following her gut instincts too.

‘I wanted to create a shop that in some way reflected me,’ Joyce says.  ‘I’m a very English girl at heart, I love the countryside on the outskirts of Shrewsbury and I wanted my shop to be English, flowery, natural and, I guess, feminine.  But I wanted to mix things up a bit as well. I’m not a person who likes to keep things simple, and Lulu Flowers had a vintage side as well, and that mix is why I went for it.’ 

Back in those days, Lulu Flowers was situated in School Gardens, tucked away behind Castle Gates.  Now it’s on Castle Street in a prime position just down from Marks & Spencer's on the other side of the road.  ‘When I come back from being away,’ Joyce says, ‘I'm overwhelmed with how pretty my shop is, and absolutely thrilled at what I’ve achieved.  When I’m here all the time, though, I wish that I was tidier. I’ve always got a hundred jobs to do,  and I’m always busy and it shows.  But I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I like every day being different, and in a shop like this it is.’

I wander around the shop.  Behind the counter are an assortment of clipboards full of notes, scissors, pots, bows, raffia and rolls of celophane. Then mixed up with the flowers and plants is an assortment of vintage stuff - pretty tea and coffee sets, old ornamental vases, pots and jugs, original paintings and interesting-looking old photographs.  There’s a series of cigarette cards mounted and hanging in one window - the History of Naval Dress, I see as I look closer - and a dolls’ house in the other, made by John Davies of Shrewsbury, bids accepted for charity, and it’s reached the £200 mark so far.

There are also a number of bird boxes dotted about.  I notice a bat box, an owl box and a fancy-bird feeding observatory. These are made by the company E.G. Wildhouse, run by Edward Giles, ex of Shrewsbury School, who has spent his university college holidays making them. They're lovely things. The bird-feeding observatory has a camera set into its tiny slate roof so that back in the comfort of home, it's possible to watch what’s going on in the bird-feeding world.

And Joyce's world, I wonder. What does she do when she’s not in the shop?  She and Terry have a place in Criccieth, she says.  She loves going down there, loves the beach and the open sky.  She’s always loved that sense of sky above her head.  She’s done a bit of travelling in her time – Australia, the Far East, New York.  When she came back to Shrewsbury from New York, she couldn’t get over how close the sky was. She feels in touch with the natural world here. And that’s important to Joyce.

On her counter, I notice a note to self about Saturday flowers.  Every week one of her customers has flowers sent to her mother, who lives in a nursing home.  That’s a nice idea, Joyce and I agree.  Another nice idea is Lonely Bouquet Day when florists not just in the UK but right across the world, from California to Singapore, not leaving out the Scilly Isles, Yorkshire and, of course, Shrewsbury, leave bouquets around their towns, to be picked up by whoever finds them.  Joyce did this last Saturday, which was International Lonely Bouquet Day.  Flowers  free to a good home were left outside the library, the Old Market Hall and even on the outskirts of town.  I hope I can make you smile, and you will please take me home, announced the docket with the bouquet, and there was a Facebook link in case  people wanted to photo their bouquets in their own homes and share them around.   

Joyce is full of stories. Some of them are of hard times.  What she went through in her biker days would set your hair on end. She describes Terry as her rescuer, who came to bring her home when things got bad.  She’s a Shrewsbury lass through and through, and it’s entirely fitting that she’s created her business in the heart of a town to which her family have been connected for generations.  

Joyce is great with words, by which I don’t mean that she talks a lot [which she’s certainly capable of doing] but that she uses exactly the right words to get across what she wants to say. She’s forthright and honest and can’t help but tell a thing as it is. Honesty’s my affliction, is how she puts it, and later, talking about the human scale of things here in Shrewsbury, and about the town rooting her and keeping her safe, she talks about the river holding everything in a fixed hug.

If you’ve ever seen a map of Shrewsbury, wrapped around by the River Severn, you’ll know what Joyce means.  And if you live here you’ll know.  Suddenly I find myself back to La Vie en Rose again, which is where I began.  I’ve come a long way round, but here we are.  When he takes me in his embrace, I see life as through rose-tinted spectacles, sings Edith Piaf [probably terrible translation but best I can do].  And you can hear her sing it, if you want.  Watch her face as she sings it in this really lovely clip. Watch her hands.  HERE’S THE LINK.   

 

HERE'S the Lulu Flowers Facebook page

HERE'S the Lulu Flowers website

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