In 1983, King Olav V of Norway presented this rock to King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. It symbolises Noway’s thanks for Sweden’s support in the Second World War, because nothing says ‘thank you’ like moving a 15-tonne rock 300 miles. It sits near the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm.

Not far away, there’s a very different rock: Space Seed by Bigert & Bergström. This bronze sculpture, inspired by a meteor shower, is intended to reflect both the destructive power of meteorites but also their suspected role in the origin of life. While the outside is burned and dark, the inside has a shiny golden finish. I rather liked it.

Apparently, Bigert & Bergström envisages people sitting on and crawling through their rock. I suspect the same behaviour would be frowned upon for the memorial rock. It’s so hard to keep up with rock etiquette these days.

When I came across this Peter Linde sculpture in Djursgården in Stockholm, I understood it to be called ‘woman of peace’ and assumed it to be an anthropomorphic representation of the idea of peace. I liked it, but I had a sneaking sense of discomfort at the underlying gender politics of representing ‘peace’ as a woman: it felt very vaguely misogynistic for a sculpture created as recently as 2016 in a country as forward-thinking in gender equality as Sweden.

I should have known better.

The English title is, in fact, ‘statue of the lady working for peace in the world’. It was presented by Swedens Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. It is dedicated to the memory of Alva Myrdal and Inga Thorsson, both Swedish women who did notable work in the field of nuclear disarmament. They are pictured on the base. The statue also serves as a tribute to all women—known and unknown—who are working for peace in the world.

This is the Waldermarsudde oil mill in Stockholm, built in 1784 and once used to produce linseed oil. These days, it’s part of the Prins Eugens art museum.

I just walked past it, so don’t have much more to tell you about it. Instead, allow me to present some disparate thoughts on windmills a long way from Sweden.

As a child, I used to be taken on an annual trip to Norfolk to visit my extended family. Seeing windmills there was always a particular treat. I particularly liked windmills with ‘headphones’, which was my inexplicable choice of word to describe sails.

One windmill we visited often was Sutton Mill, built in 1789 and the UK’s tallest surviving windmill. I only realised when coming to write this blog post that it closed to visitors in 2008, and has had something of a torrid time since, with its cap removed and bits falling off. It has now been restored and is a holiday home available to rent.

The Norfolk mills website has a nice potted history, including recent events.

I can’t find a picture of me at Sutton Mill, but here I am looking typically full of sunshine on the back of a boat on the Norfolk Broads twenty-odd years ago:

There was a lovely article by Kate Youde and Susie Mesure in the FT recently about the challenges of living in a windmill: it’s hard to find furniture to fit circular rooms, you can’t really hang pictures on sloping walls, that kind of thing. It’s unbelievable that they failed to mention Jonathan Creek.

I’d never previously clocked that windmills often need two entrances. As the cap rotates with the wind, a single entrance could be blocked by the sails. I can’t believe that I’d never thought of that before.

In 2007, I took this photograph of a windmill somewhere in Norfolk. The embedded geolocation is wrong, and I’ve spent far more time than is sensible trying to work out which windmill it might be.

I reckon it is Stow Mill, which Norfolk Mills says would have been open to the public in 2007… though it, too, has now also been converted into a holiday rental.

This is a much newer mill than Sutton and Waldermarsudde, constructed as a flour mill in 1827. Happily, though, this one proves the FT’s rule about windmills having two entrances on opposite sides, lest one be blocked by the sails… or at least it used to, but the second entrance was bricked up when shorter sails were fitted.

Thirty years ago, King Carl XVI Gustaf ordered and funded the construction of these obelisks in a square in central Stockholm. They were later moved to a less conspicuous location on the quayside.

Let’s not pretend that we can’t see why they were moved: they’re ugly. Terrazzo concrete does not sit well with plexiglass covered waves of brightly covered lights. Concrete monuments are explicitly designed to last centuries; electronic gizmos and light bulbs are not. It’s very 1990s.

The symbolism, though, is interesting. The flashy do-dahs are there to show data on the air and water quality in Stockholm, and to remind us of the impact of humanity on nature—and vice versa. King Carl XVI Gustaf is a very similar age to King Charles III, and this is a topic that clearly interests them both. Perhaps expressing environmental concerns are part of the role of a modern European monarch.

This artwork by the Belgian couple Tom and Lien Dekyvere was part of Canary Wharf’s festival of winter lights, but has since been adopted into the permanent collection.

It is a boulder made from discarded circuit boards. It lights up, but I vastly prefer it in its daytime mode, where it looks much more like a boulder and much less like a twinkly trinket.

When I’ve seen this work previously, I’ve taken it as a commentary on the impact of technology on the earth’s natural resources: all those rare earth metals returning to the rocky form from whence they came. The growth of artificial intelligence, with its outsized carbon emissions, felt like it lent the sculpture extra contemporary relevance.

In the course of writing this blog post, though, I’ve discovered that my interpretation does not align with the artists’ intention, which is more about highlighting the imperfection of digital representations of the physical world—which, I suppose, explains the garish light display.

I also thought the label was misprinted, and should have been ‘El Antica’, which I assumed to be Belgian for ‘the antique’, but that’s a load of rubbish too.

Good Lord, it’s the second post about a church in a row, I’ll need to hand this blog over to my brother if I’m not careful. Today’s visit is to St George’s Chapel, hidden away at what was once the centre of the Heathrow Airport site.

I’ve long known this existed, but I’d never visited. I’ve recently been reading Flying Blind by Peter Robison, and its mention of memorials to those killed in plane crashes spurred me to call in.

Except, one can’t call in. The church itself is open only for services. Opened in 1968, it was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who more famously designed Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and the Ulster Hospital. It is in a cave dug beneath Heathrow, stylistically similar to a crypt, the better to provide sound insulation from the noise above.

St George’s was designed with three apses, so that the Anglican, Catholic and Free Churches didn’t have to share. In the 1970s, the churches perhaps realised how petty and, dare I say it, unchristian that seemed, and so the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council banded together and rededicated one of the apses for shared used. They allowed the other two to be dedicated to use by non-Abrahamic religions, in a show of multi-faith… who am I kidding, this was the 1970s, of course they didn’t. They plonked a Bible in one of them, a font in the other, and carried on just as they were. Other faiths weren’t catered for until 1998, when a separate ground-floor multifaith prayer room was opened.

I couldn’t see any of this because the door was locked: as best as I can tell, it only opens at lunchtime four times per week these days, all of them for Catholic services. There was an A4 notice posted on the door with a number to call for urgent chaplaincy assistance… which was the same number one is advised to call if there is any ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the vicinity. I’m not sure whether the chaplain prays for divine intervention in unruly behaviour or whether the security guard comes down to take your confession.

I’m being snippier than I mean to be. You can be as atheist as me and still think that the Garden of Remembrance is quite lovely. The 16-foot oak cross is arresting, and the many and varied memorial plaques are moving. The enclosed nature of the garden makes it a surprisingly peaceful and quiet place to sit and contemplate.

There is something genuinely delightful about the fact that Heathrow has protected this space while everything around it has changed. It’s a glorious bit of human-focused inefficiency, a rare place in an airport where one can sit in peace without being expected to handover cash.

Long may it continue.

Until I saw this sign, I’d never heard of the ‘8 Bridges Way’, a walking and cycling path along the River Tees—despite having visited the Transporter Bridge many times, which is where this circular route begins and ends.

Having seen the sign and searched the web, it feels very much up my street: a twelve-mile river walk is just the sort of thing that Wendy and I might mosey along on any given weekend, especially given that we could easily catch a train down to Middlesbrough which would leave us a stone’s throw from the start.

I’ll have to add it to the list!

In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened, ushering in the era of steam locomotion—though initially only for freight, as passenger coaches continued to be drawn by horses until 1833.

But that’s not all that happened in Stockton in 1825: the Shambles also opened. It is still going strong 199 years on, though these days it hosts all sorts of shops rather than just the butchers that traditionally occupied a shambles.

When I went to give blood earlier this week, a nurse asked me to confirm my date of birth. I did so, and she commented on how I shared my birthday with the late Queen. She wasn’t wrong, but it was a slightly peculiar moment.

Wandering down Stockton High Street, I discovered via his memorial fountain that I also share a birthday with John Dodshon, a 19th-century Quaker philanthropist. And then I thought: surely I would have noticed such a prominent fountain with my birthday on it when I lived in Stockton?

And so I descended a watery rabbit hole.

Dodshon’s memorial drinking fountain was unveiled on Monday 26 August 1878. The Stockton Examiner described it as ‘a massive structure of stone’ with ‘a rather commanding appearance.’

But what did he do to deserve such a memorial? The newspaper considered it ‘unnecessary to say much here’, save that he ‘distinguished himself, and the many qualities of his nature fitted him for the different walks of life in which it was his delight to treat, and helped to make him a useful and esteemed townsman.’

But an anonymous letter to the Stockton Examiner a few weeks before the unveiling took a rather different, and rather more intemperate, view:

I have for some days been wondering what was about to be done in the middle of our much-boasted High-street, and now I learn that the site has been fixed upon to erect a memorial fountain in perpetuation of the memory of the late Mr John Dodshon. I confess I was astonished at this, and upon making inquiries I was informed it was a public monument! Really, what next, I wonder? Public monument! I pretend to know something about Stockton and what is going on, but I never heard of a public fountain to John Dodshon before.

What has Mr John Dodshon done for the town? Let’s know that first, and act when the question is answered. Verily, it seems our Town Council will allow Tom, Dick, and Harry, to erect monuments to their deceased chums if they only take it into their heads to do so. If those who are the prime movers in this scheme had only looked round, they might easily have found some more useful purpose for spending money—even to glorify the uneventful life of John Dodshon.

I have every respect and admiration for the late Mr Dodshon, but I cannot see that there is anything wise in sticking up a privately-provided fountain, the design of which has not been submitted to the public,m and of which everybody seems to be in ignorance about, in one of the finest streets of Great Britain. I hope the Town Council will reconsider this matter at their next meeting and come to some other conclusion upon it before the fountain is knocked down in disgust as a street obstruction.

‘Uneventful life’? ‘Street obstruction’? Blimey!

Clearly, there was something of a chorus of disapproval—so much, in fact, that it was mentioned in the local MP’s speech at the unveiling:

We regret to hear that some objections have been made to this monument occupying as it now does a portion of this magnificent High-street. No doubt it occupies a certain portion of space, and I am free to confess that I am one of those who hope that the time will come—and I must say I think it is not far distant—when all these hideous structures in our midst will be swept away, and this market place will be devoted to its more legitimate purpose—the accommodation of those who frequent our lively, rising, and increasing market.

When the time comes to which I have just referred, I am sure the Corporation will be as liberal as at present, and if we have to find a substitute site for this fountain that it will be really afforded.

‘Hideous structures?’ Crikey!

Over the next few weeks, there was also a bit of a spat in the letters column about the functioning of the horse troughs which were part of the fountain, with the architect himself writing in at one point. It has very 19th-century Facebook vibes.

Its fate didn’t improve: perhaps out of convenience, or perhaps out of protest, the local fishmongers started to store and clean their wares in the fountain, leaving it in a right state—and making the water rather unpalatable. Within 15 years, it had been shifted away from the High Street and down to Ropner Park.

But in 1995, the Council decided to restore it to the High Street, albeit in a different position, more or less outside M&S. I used to pop into M&S when I lived in Stockton—so absolutely nothing in this tale answers the question of why I never noticed a fountain with my birthday on it.

Since I left Stockton, it’s been moved again: in 2014, the Council relocated the fountain back to its original position in the High Street, completing a round trip that’s lasted more than a century. It no longer works as a drinking fountain, of course, and a great many of the original features such as the bronze lion heads that used to spout the water have long since been lost.

It’s strange to think that a monument which was so controversial in its day has become so beloved a century later as to be worthy of several expensive relocations despite becoming relatively dilapidated. I wonder if it will still be there a hundred years hence?