Magdalen Road at night

Magdalen Road at night
December 2010

Thursday 14 December 2017

By-election for city council seat, 13th December 2017



The results of the by-election for the Exeter City Council ward of St Leonard's and Newtown on 13th December 2017.
Matthew Vizard Labour: 1,044, 54.6%
Lucille Baker Conservatives: 512, 26.8%
Vanessa Newcombe Lib Dems: 179, 9.4%
Tom Milburn Green Party: 137, 7.2%
Alison Sheridan UKIP: 40, 2.1%

Saturday 2 December 2017

Magdalen Road Christmas Fair 2017

Magdalen Road was closed for the afternoon of Saturday 2nd December 2017 for the annual Christmas Fair.  Join me for a walk after dark, from St Leonards Road to Denmark Road and back again


The children's roundabout

Balloons on sale

Japanese food

The Bran Tub with seasonal food

Tents in the middle of the road

Amber necklaces and other good things

No home in St Leonard's is complete without a hand-made cushion

A bright red glow from the aprons of the staff at Bon Gout

Don't forget to look up at the lights

Buttons and other sewing things, ribbons and all

The Meat59 gazebo outside the restaurant

And an artistic arrival

There were stalls for charity

... and musicians

Coloured gazebos added a glow to the fair

A small Christmas tree


Stalls outside the shops
Stalls outside the flats

Time to add a light to your home?

And fresh local fruit

The Mount Radford was busy

Saturday 22 July 2017

Coal in St Leonard’s



Strange as it may seem to young people, houses with central heating are a relatively recent phenomenon.  I grew up in a house built in the 1950s; even at such a recent date, outside the back door was a coal-shed integrated into the house, and every so often a lorry loaded with sacks of coal would arrive to deliver fuel for the open fires and anthracite for the kitchen range.  One pair of grandparents, in an older house, had a coal-cellar, reached by a flight of steps from the garden.  The other grandparents, in a more modest property, had a coal-bunker outside the back door.   By the time I left home, central heating and electric fires had replaced the dependence on coal; the coal-cellar and coal-shed had become store-rooms, the bunker had been taken away in pieces.  

Scattered around St Leonard’s there are, I am sure, similar reminders of the use of coal in our homes.  Some people still buy coal, but few need deliveries measured in hundredweights as the earlier generations did.  So the storage spaces have disappeared or found alternative uses, laundry rooms, a place for garden tools, and so on.  Such reminders of the past are on private land, we are not aware of the changes in other people’s homes.  

Of course, house chimneys are a permanent reminder of an age of open fires, and I wrote about them in an earlier issue.  But at ground level, there is one kind of public and visible reminder of how we used to use and store coal.  And that is the coal-hole cover.  If a house boasted a coal-cellar then it needed a way of filling that cellar.  The family could access their fuel from inside, but they did not want dusty tradesmen traipsing through the front door to deliver a dirty, coal-encrusted sack.  The solution was a chute, large enough for the fuel, but small enough to prevent intruders entering the property.  And the chute needed a cover, usually a heavy cast-iron circular cover, set into the pavement outside the property or into the garden paving around the house.  

There are still a few coal-hole covers in pavements to be found in the neighbourhood.  Many will have been lost over the years as houses are altered and pavements resurfaced.  I have only found a handful, in Colleton Crescent and Matford Lane, or between us and the city centre, in Southernhay.  If you are passing, take a look at the attractive designs on these utilitarian pieces of ironwork. 
Circular coal-hole cover in Matford Lane

Friends in the older parts of the neighbourhood tell me that there were examples outside their front doors, in shallow front gardens; but those front gardens are now parking spaces for cars, and the pieces of ironwork have been thrown away – though one at least has been retained for decoration and is visible in Wonford Road.   


Rectangular and circular covers in Colleton Crescent
 
Bloggers in London and Cheltenham (and elsewhere) have recorded the coal-hole covers in their cities, with pictures. 

Are there any other surviving coal-hole covers locally?  This is an open-ended article; I would be delighted to get further information about this topic.
 
Keywords: St Leonards, Exeter, history, geography, beauty  
coal-holes

Friday 16 June 2017

2017 general election results for Exeter


Elected: Labour candidate Ben Bradshaw, 34,336 votes, with 62% of the votes of a 71.7% turnout, with a majority of 16,117
Conservative James Taghdissian polled 18,219
Liberal Democrat Vanessa Newcombe polled 1,562
Green Joe Levy polled 1,027
Independent Jonathan West polled 212
Independent Jonathan Bishop polled 67