Castle Aching

[Andy Hayter]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Sorry to flog this one (but it's all I have to show for the last 5 months!). I had a chance to photograph the Drill Hall in daylight today, so please indulge me in two or three further shots ...

 

More than happy to indulge that standard of modelling - any time of the day or night.

[Buhar]

1 hour ago, Caley Jim said:

You might also like Tim Watson's building undergoing demolition on Copenhagen Fields.

 

Jim

That's the other example I had in mind. They're both superb in different ways. Remember too, Tim's is in your tiny scale.

[Edwardian]

2 hours ago, nick_bastable said:

Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?

 

Nick

 

Well, I am numbered among the Fellows and Scholars of the Holy Trinity of Norwich, if that's any help?

 

Mr Ahern, the dispensing chemist and photographer on Bailey Street, has been producing postcards again ....

Edited February 4, 2019 by Edwardian

[Annie]

Been asleep so late to the party.   

James, you have every right to be proud of your Drill Hall model because it's superb.  And since it's your thread you can post as may pictures of it as you please.

I do have join my voice to other members of the parish council and say that the third photo with the dramatic sky really is quite something.

[Jim15B]

I know it's been said a couple of times before - amazing work on the drill hall.

[Martin S-C]

5 hours ago, nick_bastable said:

Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?

 

Nick

Not personally, no. Does he serve a fine port?

[Edwardian]

6 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

Not personally, no. Does he serve a fine port?

 

Clearly, the port is with you, my Lord

[Hroth]

2 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Clearly, the port is with you, my Lord

Pardon me! It's that Aldi port again...

[corneliuslundie]

And a final word - I promise unless anyone else continues the discussion - on saloons. A very nice restored example here, also with a proper underframe:

https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/midland-railway-1260.906798/

Annie, i hope to see this and the LNWR one visiting your virtual part of the world shortly. I fear however that they might b rather unlikely up a Welsh valley.

Jonathan

[Hroth]

11 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

Not personally, no. Does he serve a fine port?

 

I believe his eggs are not half bad either...

 

[Martin S-C]

We can continue the discussion about saloons. Here's one. It even has a steam engine outside and its in the "west", (might even be the west of Norfolk County for all I know) so all highly relevant.

 

[Hroth]

Excerpt from "The Tourists Guide to West Norfolk and its Environs: 2nd Ed"

 

When in Castle Aching, be sure to visit The Drill Hall, which has a fine display of boring implements, including the Erstwhile Dental Appliances Collection. Admission is FREE.

 

[Hroth]

2 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

We can continue the discussion about saloons. Here's one. It even has a steam engine outside and its in the "west", (might even be the west of Norfolk County for all I know) so all highly relevant.

 

I like the hat-stand next to the Portable Engine!

[Guy Rixon]

19 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Sorry to flog this one (but it's all I have to show for the last 5 months!). I had a chance to photograph the Drill Hall in daylight today, so please indulge me in two or three further shots ...

It's magnificent. I suggest not trying to weather it. Yes, it would probably have been grubbier in 1905, but it looks right to modern eyes, used to ancient buildings being cleaned and restored.

[Edwardian]

Weathering is an interesting question.  The chosen brick paper is "aged".  Flint wears hard and doesn't much change it seems to me. The question is how much obvious smoke or weather staining there might be.  

 

Aside from the bits of Mediaeval fabric, the building is 40 years old by 1905 - the whole point of the style is to give the impression of antiquity.

 

That might be time enough to get quite dirty in a town, but here we are alongside a large village in rural Norfolk.  How weathered, I wonder, would it be?  Save darkening of pantiles in some cases, none of the other CA buildings have been consciously weathered. Perhaps it is all too clean?

 

A modern building is perhaps not a fair comparison The difference between pre and post clean air legislation is probably much less obvious in rural locations, though there might be other factors; modern bricks, for instance, do they wear better than Victorian bricks?  But, how distressed and cruddy is a well-maintained brick-built institutional building of 1978 today?

 

BTW, in photographs of the Norwich Chapel Hill Road hall, I failed to discern any difference between the Victorian masonry and that of the surviving Mediaeval tower.  The latter had clearly been dressed up with new windows and parapet, but I would not be surprised if it had been simply refaced wholesale, with nothing original left visible. 

[Annie]

5 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

And a final word - I promise unless anyone else continues the discussion - on saloons. A very nice restored example here, also with a proper underframe:

https://www.national-preservation.com/threads/midland-railway-1260.906798/

Annie, i hope to see this and the LNWR one visiting your virtual part of the world shortly. I fear however that they might b rather unlikely up a Welsh valley.

Jonathan

Wow!  That is a seriously nice restoration.  Thank you Jonathan.  And what's more the Midland saloon's keepers actually know how to take a proper photograph that would be of use to historians and modellers alike.

[Caley Jim]

3 hours ago, Hroth said:

Excerpt from "The Tourists Guide to West Norfolk and its Environs: 2nd Ed"

 

When in Castle Aching, be sure to visit The Drill Hall, which has a fine display of boring implements, including the Erstwhile Dental Appliances Collection. Admission is FREE.

 

In the dental context, 'appliances ' means partial dentures, obturators, removable orthodontic appliances,etc.  Perhaps you mean dental instruments? 

 

Jim 

[DonB]

I don't recall a post giving the dimensions of the footprint and maximum height of the Drill Hall.  Apologies if i wasn't paying attention...but could you enlighten me ?

 

Like other parishioners, I was very impressed by the outdoor shots,... Magnificent!

[Guy Rixon]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

A modern building is perhaps not a fair comparison The difference between pre and post clean air legislation is probably much less obvious in rural locations, though there might be other factors; modern bricks, for instance, do they wear better than Victorian bricks?  But, how distressed and cruddy is a well-maintained brick-built institutional building of 1978 today?

Institutional brick buildings of the late seventies are not that common. However, I can offer a data point from 1990: Greenwich House in Cambridge. This is a large, yellow-brick building, put up to house the Royal Greenwich Observatory when it moved from Herstmonceux and later taken over by the University of Cambridge. It was considered a high-spec design when built, meaning that the architecture is tragic but the materials are good. In 29 years, there is no visible weathering of the bricks. C.f. yellow-brick cottages in the nearby villages when the bricks have weathered noticeably in about 60 years. This does suggest that modern bricks are somehow different.

[Edwardian]

2 minutes ago, Guy Rixon said:

Institutional brick buildings of the late seventies are not that common. However, I can offer a data point from 1990: Greenwich House in Cambridge. This is a large, yellow-brick building, put up to house the Royal Greenwich Observatory when it moved from Herstmonceux and later taken over by the University of Cambridge. It was considered a high-spec design when built, meaning that the architecture is tragic but the materials are good. In 29 years, there is no visible weathering of the bricks. C.f. yellow-brick cottages in the nearby villages when the bricks have weathered noticeably in about 60 years. This does suggest that modern bricks are somehow different.

 

Here's the court in Leeds, which i believe dates from 1978.  These seem to be a type of hard modern brick apparently impervious to ageing!

  

 

1 hour ago, DonB said:

I don't recall a post giving the dimensions of the footprint and maximum height of the Drill Hall.  Apologies if i wasn't paying attention...but could you enlighten me ?

 

Like other parishioners, I was very impressed by the outdoor shots,... Magnificent!

 

No, I have not posted dimensions, if only because I have never drawn up a plan for the building.  To give me a start I scaled up a plan of the Norwich Chapel Hill Road structure but really just  guess dimensions from photographs and made it up as I went along. That said, on the CA drill hall only the 'L'-shaped façade is intended to be close to scale, as the Norwich hall was a much larger structure than would be suitable for CA.

 

I can tell you that the internal length of the hall itself is 60' at scale, so 240mm, more or less the length of the clerestory, by 30'. 

 

 

Taking out the ruler to satisfy your curiosity, and now mine, I find that the overall length of the structure is approximately 20", and at its widest, 9 1/2".  The two tall square towers on the gatehouse section are the tallest part of the structure and are about 6 1/2" tall.  

 

[nick_bastable]

17 hours ago, Martin S-C said:

Not personally, no. Does he serve a fine port?

just to explain

 

In gentlemen's clubs in St James's to ordinary dinner tables it is imperative to pass the port to the left, pouring a glass for your neighbour on your right before you do so.

Ideally, the decanter (vintage port is always decanted because of the extreme level of sediment in the bottle) should never stop its clockwise progress around the table until it is finished.

If the decanter should ever stall it is considered very bad form to ask for it. Instead, you ask the person hogging the decanter: "Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?". If they are au fait with port etiquette they will immediately realise their faux pas and pass along the decanter with an apology. If not, and they answer in the negative, you should say: "He's a terribly good chap, but he always forgets to pass the port.

 

from the torygraph   a ex girlfriend's father was a stickler for such things but he did serve excellent  port

 

Nick

 

[Edwardian]

2 minutes ago, nick_bastable said:

just to explain

 

In gentlemen's clubs in St James's to ordinary dinner tables it is imperative to pass the port to the left, pouring a glass for your neighbour on your right before you do so.

Ideally, the decanter (vintage port is always decanted because of the extreme level of sediment in the bottle) should never stop its clockwise progress around the table until it is finished.

If the decanter should ever stall it is considered very bad form to ask for it. Instead, you ask the person hogging the decanter: "Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?". If they are au fait with port etiquette they will immediately realise their faux pas and pass along the decanter with an apology. If not, and they answer in the negative, you should say: "He's a terribly good chap, but he always forgets to pass the port.

 

from the torygraph   a ex girlfriend's father was a stickler for such things but he did serve excellent  port

 

Nick

 

 

At regimental dinners, it was sometimes made clear that the port decanter should be in perpetual motion and not touch the table.  This, of course, is not suitable when, at Bar mess or officers' mess, messing in a group of four!

 

This is the idea that, however many are seated at a table, each group of four (two each side of the table) forms a discrete mess. 

 

As you know, I am easily confused and when dining at my Inn the Loyal Toast used conventional words but was taken seated, whereas in my regiment we stood for the Loyal Toast but gave it to the Duke of Lancaster! 

[Rob Pulham]

37 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Here's the court in Leeds, which i believe dates from 1978.  These seem to be a type of hard modern brick apparently impervious to ageing!

  The two tall square towers on the gatehouse section are the tallest part of the structure and are about 6 1/2" tall.  

 

I can assure you that it has aged on the inside as I occasionally visit on behalf of work when colleagues have connectivity issues in the building. Its not to be recommended....

[Edwardian]

4 minutes ago, Rob Pulham said:

I can assure you that it has aged on the inside as I occasionally visit on behalf of work when colleagues have connectivity issues in the building. Its not to be recommended....

 

It's the sort of building that people do not admit to visiting without adding an innocent explanation!  I appeared there reasonably frequently once upon a time.

 

Combined court centres made life on circuit interesting.  You might be there to argue some arcane bit of company law in the District Registry, but black marias would turn up and you might see defendants led past you cuffed and surrounded by armed police.

 

It also meant rubbing shoulders with the criminal bar in the robing room.  I once overheard two of them in Liverpool:

 

"What have you got today then?"

 

"Drug dealer found dead in the gutter"

 

"Oh, so a litter offence"

[corneliuslundie]

I used to be invited to the annual dinner of the Worshipful Company of Lightmongers - no I am not making this up. There I was instructed that when anyone next to you was toasting it was your duty to guard his/her back by standing back to back with him/her. I never noticed any back stabbing in the lighting industry but perhaps they switched the lights off first.

That Drill Hall is quite a big model by the standards of what one usually sees on models,  20 inches is 127 feet long. Longer than the platform at some small stations and long enough to store four shortish six wheeled carriages - though I would not dream of suggesting such a fate for such a magnificent structure..

Jonathan