Pre-CrimeFest
(Photo by Mike Gove)Your humble blogkeeper was too jet-lagged and congested to do much of anything today except take a desultory walk around Bristol with a brief stop to have lunch and watch cricket on television.
I did see enough to note that Bristol seems to have done much with its old waterfront. This has included glitzy projects with lots of shiny metal and the word millennium, but it also incorporates old trains, track and tow-boats, none decayed but some with just enough of the ramshackle about them to remind visitors what this city was built on and how distant that past has become.
These reminders take in a plaque that notes Bristol's role in the dreadful triangular trade: arms and other metal goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and raw goods such as sugar back to England. The whole reminds me a bit of Belfast, with its waterfront plans that include a museum around the slip where the Titanic was built, and the massive Harland and Wolff cranes.
These reminders take in a plaque that notes Bristol's role in the dreadful triangular trade: arms and other metal goods to Africa, slaves to the Caribbean, and raw goods such as sugar back to England. The whole reminds me a bit of Belfast, with its waterfront plans that include a museum around the slip where the Titanic was built, and the massive Harland and Wolff cranes.
Tomorrow: Crime time.
© Peter Rozovsky 2009
Labels: conventions, Crimefest, CrimeFest 2009, England, images, what I did on my vacation
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 3:32 PM
11 Comments:
All the panels look interesting, but I particularly like tomorrow's @ 4:30pm: "Eric Ambler and who – Forgotten Authors"
I'm looking forwayd to that one andf also to Bill James' appearances Friday.
You're referring to what the Belfast City planners now call the "Titanic Quarter". I have another name for it: "The We Really Screwed Up Big Time Didn't We? District."
But it's got a Marks & Spencer Simply Food, so it must be all right.
Oh, and I forgot; are you popping up to Manchester to see what we did after the IRA did their bit? Place is completely changed. For the better.
Adrian, I did hear more than once in Belfast last year the wry remark that bombings had taken care of property-clearance questions that might otherwise have plagued developers.
That Titanic Quarter certainly does look, shall we say, like a district in the process of becoming. But I do like that the H&W cranes, Samson and Goliath, are being preserved.
I am in favor of Marks & Spencer Simply Food, whose slogan ought to be "Don't Let the Twee Name Fool You." And I don't know if I'll get to Manchester on this trip. You've lots to see here for such a small kingdom.
That's not Bill James the baseball stats guru, is it? (Checks Wikipedia)
Ah, no. That would have been amusing if it were.
It's not that Bill James, but it is an interesting coincidence that possibly the greatest baseball thinker ever and possibly the finest prose stylist ever to write crime fiction in English share the same names.
It makes one wonder if Henty James and William James called each other Hank and Bill.
No what I mean is, its a bloody nerve to celebrate such a shoddy piece of engineering by naming part of a town after it. And both my dad and my sister! worked in Harland and Wolff so this is an interior critique.
Black humor, is it? No, I suspect not. Just a respect for the power of the Titanic name.
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