Or at least the second morning. There are people we know who, if they found themselves at a loose end in a tourist town first thing in the morning, perhaps a couple of hours from home, would make a day of it, would do the tourist thing until it was dark, then head off home, tired but satisfied. We, however, are made of weaker stuff and the day that we are leaving, we like to get off. Which is what we did on this occasion, just stopping long enough to take a few snaps outside the hotel.
Starting with the near 200 year old Ensigne Place across Ivy Lane from the hotel front car park. I wondered this afternoon about how it started out, which is made rather clearer by a snap from Street View.
So we started out with a symmetrical block, with one pair of chimneys to the right and another to the left. Maybe it started as a rental block of four units with four front doors and, mindful of the red polish to be found towards the end of reference 1, perhaps there was something in the tenancy agreements about keeping the front door steps in decent condition. Then, at some point, the left hand unit was sold off and allowed to go its own way.
While not long after construction, the door which was where the second window from the right now is, and is still marked by the now redundant boot scraper, had been converted into a window, with No.3 being converted into a much bigger unit. A much bigger unit which ran to two staircases, which was perhaps some consolation for messing about with the tightly planned layout of a two up two down. Something that convertors of three bedroom suburban houses will know all about.
The central door is presumably the passage out back for dustbins, bicycles and the like. Quite a decent sized yard according to Satellite View, complete with a substantial tree. About the same aerial resolution as we get here at Epsom - but not as good as you get in central London.
As noted before, it all reminded very much of Romsey Town in Cambridge, from where the snap above is taken. I would have thought that they were roughly the same age, but in Cambridge they get back gardens rather than back yards and sometimes they get rooms with a view above their passages. On the other hand, they don't get boot scrapers by their front doors and they don't get arches above their front doors.
Perhaps some architectural student should write a piece comparing and contrasting the two places, both on the outskirts of ancient towns which were once home to lots of parsons and lawyers.
Back in the car park and rotating left, a view of the inner by-pass, a section which does not come with a city wall on the far side.
While round to the right we have what was once a reasonably grand door. Locked and bolted now, but sufficiently grand that there is still a lot of brown wood panelling and trim on the other side, Travelodge makeover notwithstanding. While outside we have the boot scraper, lower left. Maybe in the morning I will give some thought to why the window might be where it is.
The plaque to the right records the fact that Mary Tourtel, 1874-1948, the creator of Rupert Bear, spent the last part of her life here. Reference 2 suggests that she was rich and tells us that she liked to live in hotels rather than houses - and as a widowed Canterbury girl, wound up in this one. Perhaps this door served as her private entrance to her private apartments. Did she have her own maid, or did she make do with a girl from the hotel?
And so into the car and off to Epsom. We spotted three Wellingtonia before we got to the M20: one sick, one indifferent and one in good health - but none scored. Once we were on the road, we were hard to stop. We also noticed quite a lot of river, which we had missed in the dark on the way in, possibly some part of the Stour.
Indeed, a peek at Ordnance Survey today, a chunk of which is snapped above, suggests that both the railway and the A28 follow the Stour through a gap in the North Downs, rather in the way that both the railway and the A24 follow the Mole through the Mole gap a little to the west, between Leatherhead and Dorking. But no Box Hill, National Trust and south facing scarp slope in Kent, not that I can see.
We did think about taking some noodles, for a change, in one of the fast food joints in a service area, but in the end we didn't. We may have settled for a quick lentil soup at home.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-outsider.html.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Tourtel.
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