Liverpool Aylesburys

One fine February morning, Richard, Bethany and myself set off from their home in Wrexham to search for three more Aylesburys on the Birkenhead peninsula.

The trip was not entirely coincidental. We were slightly at a loss at what to do on a Saturday, neither Richard or Bethany had visited an Aylesbury before, save Aylesbury Prime. A term they both used as if it was the common name for the one, original town in Buckinghamshire. Happy with a piece of impromptu nomenclature I ran with it, we all knew what we meant.

I felt slightly guilty, it was only Bethany who had been at work on Friday and indeed all of the week. Rich and I had taken delivery of a new washing machine and generally messed around the rest of the day. Now I was taking her on a jaunt of possibly questionable interest, for her, on one of two of her valuable days off. However she was happy and excited to be part of the venture, if not almost permanently cold throughout. Despite my car's ridiculous air heating capabilities able to reach “midday Sahara” if required, I felt slightly guilty.

After a good breakfast of a childish cereal and some coffee, tea and fruit juice (Me, Bethany and Rich respectively) we set off. First to pick up petrol, then to drive the distance up to the first Aylesbury of the day, and for Richard and Bethany, ever, except for Aylesbury Prime.

Well, let me tell you, it was a beauty. A lovely little cul-de-sac (lit. bottom of the bag, or Bag End for Tolkien wordplay fans). 9 houses of generous proportions, well kempt (for the younger English audience “kempt” meant something like “peng” around 1570 and makes about as much sense. For the Chinese audience, peng in English doesn't mean a large, possibly semi mythological bird, but, “really nice looking” or “good weed” if you are reggae singer Frankie Paul, which I guess the London and more universally UK “peng” term came from in Jamaican patois. In a misheard lyric incident, I thought Frankie's song “pass the Kushem peng” the lyric was “good champagne” in possibly one of the most middle class misappropriations of Jamaican culture around) anyway I digress and will never use the term “peng” personally, except perhaps about really good champagne to confuse everyone concerned.

The place looked sleepy in the Saturday morning February light, duly photos were taken of the nice street, no wonder Rich and Bethany look so excited in the photo.

Efficiently we left and moved straight onto number two roughly 20 minutes away. This one was a little less well kempt (see above), but still had a charm. A 1960's housing street. Not a lot of note, except the rather interesting location of a good number of snails hibernating over winter and a golf ball. Which I hope was deposited there by a freak shot from a fairway somewhere nearby.

As we were passing with Bethany in the car, we took a number of photos of Bethany Chapel, finding everything rather incidentally fun.

We headed to the head of the head, New Brighton, the location of our final Aylesbury. New Brighton has an air of a “British Seaside Town”. Funfair, Check, Rock and Fudge shop, Check, Promenade, check, crazy golf course, check, unhealthy food cafe, check.

We parked up in a supermarket carpark and headed off for some lunch, ravenous after two Aylesburys. We ended up in sort of Mexican food purveyors, Chimichangas. With a panoramic view of Liverpool's dock district and the windy February day's rapid cloud procession added a sublime backdrop for lunch.

Post lunch we wandered up the sea front and visited a book fayre in the even more panoramic, and scarily named Floral Pavilion Theatre.

Then round onto the banks of the Mersey, past some well designed flats with glass shields on their balconies and up the promenade.

There, on the beach, was a beauty of a public interactive sculpture of a pirate ship. A mix of driftwood and reclaimed industrial wood, fairy lights, voodoo faces, false canons, it was a true success of public sculpture and much appreciated.

We passed the Perch Rock Fort which never really got going as a fort, given that the Irish never were pursuaded by anyone else that the English were worth invading. The following extract from the website http://www.fortperchrock.org/Fort_Perch_Rock/Home.html shows why it was a superfluous addition to the UK's defences.

“The guns at Fort Perch Rock were fired only twice in anger. The first occasion occurred during the First World War. A Norwegian sailing ship came up the Rock Channel that had been declared closed at the start of the war. Unfortunately the gunners had the wrong elevation on their gun and the shell flew over the ship and landed in Hightown on the other side of the Mersey. Apparently an irate householder collected the shell, put it in a bucket and took it to the Merseyside Defence HQ and demanded some kind of explanation! The captain of the Norwegian vessel when eventually challenged about his ship’s use of the closed channel replied that he did not know that a war had started!”... luckily no one was hurt.

... No mention of the second incident is mentioned, clearly more embarrassing that the first's ineptitude.

Aylesbury Road was a fin-de-siecle roughly 1890's housing street. Red brick standard layout houses, which I hope are preserved in style until their original build rationale is defunct, all is demolished and started again. If the owners in this street, and/or their regional authority, agree on maintaining or sympathising with the window frames, bricks, roofs, soffits, guttering and general architecture of the houses externally, then there will be a triumph for decades to come.

Brick work on newer residential houses is usually a horrible utilitarian abomination. The cheapest price wins, or the cheapest design wins. Thus I have a natural aversion to bricks in general. However in this street, flourishes, additions, details are all in brick and they are beautiful. Collectively they provide an aesthetic momentum that provides the illusion of walking though the street as it might have been in the late 19^th, early 20^th centuries. All this could be shattered because of an owner inadvertently 'doing their own thing'.

We headed back to Wrexham to deliver Bethany and Rich home, but not after a bit of in depth Aylesbury analysis. I drank Chai tea, - 2 sugars and milk.

We discussed the importance of place, belonging and the seemingly random place name generator that UK authorities have in creating “location”. I made my way back to Nottingham, receiving a panicky message on Whatsapp a number of hours later enquiring of my health, that I hadn't died in a crash en-route. A crucial faux-pas (if we are going to have cul-de-sac, we can have faux pas, or lit. bad step, someone in France falling over) mistake on my part, of entering the door, then promptly sitting down on the settee, setting my otherwise dead phone charging and falling asleep after a wonderfully exciting triplet, tripod, triple, Peng day.