I’ve heard there are families that don’t stop at every crazy golf course they see when driving around the country. I’ve heard about them but I’m not sure they exist. How would they fill their seaside days if they’re not knocking golf balls through windmills, houses and into top hats? I just can’t imagine. Anyway. Suffice to say that we are quite the crazy golf connoisseurs and you should believe us when we assert that this crazy golf course in Mablethorpe is as close to perfection as you’ll ever find. Well worth traversing the barren nothingness of Lincolnshire to get there.

As you’ll know from your extensive experience of crazy golf courses, there’s an increasing tendency for course owners to get some off-the-shelf, plastic holes from a warehouse somewhere, blot them to a bit of concrete and call it a top-flight course. We’re always disappointed by this approach. We’ll always play on them but there’s nothing as exciting as a truly individual home-made course like this one. It’s not just amusements, it’s folk art. The colours, the ideas and the friendliness make it a lovely place to spend half an hour.

Our favourite hole is probably the enormous Humber Bridge, a vast hole which provides a challenge for even the most skilled minigolfer. But you can’t fault the house with boots and a moustache, the fat boy or the cannon. And the coup de gras is of course the final hole which will squirt water at you when you get your ball in. Genius. Andy Miller in his marvelous book Tilting At Windmills, chronicles his time attempting to get good at crazy golf. He visits a lot of courses. And he shares our enthusiasm declaring Mablethorpe Crazy Golf to be ‘the best in the country’.

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Posted by Russell on April 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

A dingy campsite in a forlorn corner of south-west Scotland isn't the sort of place you'd expect to find immortalised in film, but then, The Wicker Man is no ordinary movie. The bizarre tale of pagan rites in a backward Scottish island hit the screens in 1973 and was promptly forgotten, but now its sinister bent, great cast and a groovy soundtrack put it right up there as one of the great cult movies. So much so that it has spawned a Hollywod remake, although the less said about that the better.

The original is set in Summerisle, a fictional island in the north of Scotland, but a tight shooting schedule meant the weather up north would have been too severe in October. Dumfries and Galloway had to make do. Not that it was exactly warm - the cast had to suck ice cubes to stop their breath showing in the supposed "summer" scenes. It's certainly not the place to be wandering around in your nightshirt, even beside a roaring fire.

Past the caravans of Burrowhead Holiday Village near Isle of Whithorn on the edge of the Irish Sea, the Wicker Man took shape. At the time, the Galloway Gazette reported that its construction was shrouded in secrecy lest “provoked by crowds of sightseers, the monster might break free of the scaffolding which imprisons him, devastating the surrounding countryside and terrifying the locals”¹. Two men were built - a larger one for the main shots, and a smaller one 500 yards away for the close-ups of Howie (Edward Woodward) and the final dramatic shot of the head tumbling into the sunset. [I'm not going into any more detail here in case you haven't seen the film]. The remains of the main man, as it were, have been destroyed by over-zealous visitors over the years but the stumps of the smaller one remain cemented into the cliff-top with the initials “WM” and the date 1972 carved into the base.

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Posted by Anne on August 27, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

In the height of the cold war, back in the days when our foes were defined and known and telephones had wires attached, the post office built a bomb proof telephone exchange on the banks of the Thames, between Cannon Street station and London Bridge. Its concrete is clad in GRP (glass reinforced polyester), bright even after 30 years exposed to the elements. With the windows presenting a dark contrasting surface, it's no shrinking violet. Deep in its subsurface heart, lurks giant generators to power the building in the event of attack from the enemy, evidenced by the huge cooling cubes on the roof of the building.

Designed by architects Hubbard, Ford and Partners, on its completion in 1975 Mondial House was the largest exchange in Europe. The striking stepped-back style allows unobstructed views of St Paul's Cathedral beyond in line with strict planning requirements for the area. The front of the building facing Upper Thames Street, incorporates its name in the concrete that surrounds the building, and also the fire station that sits under one corner.

If anything should be deemed to entitle a building to special protection, it's a slating from Prince Charles, describing it as "the dreadful Mondial House". "To me, this building is redolent of a word processor," he wrote, apparently as criticism. To me, it's more like the seminal Commodore PET computer, but that's a semantic difference - either way, Mondial House is a bold, striking, innovative building.

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Posted by Ian on August 20, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (9)