Gadabout: MANSFIELD Mansfield is the largest town in Nottinghamshire, but only because Nottingham is a city. It lies 12 miles north of Nottingham and an hour's bus ride southeast of Chesterfield on the other side of the M1. Again we're on the edge of an abandoned coalfield but Mansfield is probably better known for its proximity to Sherwood Forest, despite not quite being in that either. With a population nudging 100,000 it's no small market town, nor any major tourist draw, nor doing especially well on the economic front. But I uncovered plenty of interest for a one-off visit, indeed found the town quite eye-opening, and at least its museum was open this time. Ten postcards follow. [Visit Mansfield] [20 photos] ✉ The forest a plaque overlooking a none-too impressive oak. The inscription claims that an ancient tree stood here until 1940 and that the replacement was planted by the leader of the council in 1988, but if you stand here now outside a barber shop and a Moldovan grocery store it feels about as unforesty as you can get. Based on forest borders when King John was on the throne, however, Mansfield's centrality claim is more convincing. Alas far less of Sherwood remains these days, the largest surviving swathe lying beyond easy walking distance to the northeast. It's a half hour bus ride to Edwinstowe if you want to see the historic Major Oak in Sherwood Forest Country Park, the massive tree in which Robin Hood and his merry men allegedly hung out. Realistically its girth would have been a lot less than 10m in those days, also the tree's not in good shape as it battles against old age and a changing climate, but it's still arguably a better tourist option than spending half a day in Mansfield. ✉ The railway Mansfield joined the railway network in 1849, initially as a terminus. In 1875 the line continued north to Worksop via a viaduct that cuts right across the heart of the town, though not in a domineering way. The 15 brick arches launch off from a sandstone cliff where people lived in cave houses until the end of the Victorian era, and land on the far side beside a lacklustre railway hotel. Mansfield lost its connection for Beeching-related reasons in 1964 and for many years claimed to be the largest town in England without a railway station, but was linked back up again in 1995 when the Robin Hood Line reopened. It still only gets one train an hour for most of the day though, hence the neighbouring swooshy bus station is considerably busier. ✉ The museum Leeming Street started out as a collection donated by a Victorian philanthropist who inherited his fortune from the Mansfield Brewery. This is one of the local industries celebrated in the entrance corridor along with Metal Box, a company that originally sold mustard in decorated tins before deducing there was much more money in exploiting the tins themselves. If you used to buy Altoid mints or still keep your screws in a rusting Quality Street tin the source was probably the Metal Box factory in Rock Valley, recently demolished. Once you walk past the museum's information desk the galleries become rather more sparse - some stuffed birds, a bit of art, a movie props exhibition, really not many dinosaurs - so I would very much suggest focusing your time on Made In Mansfield instead. ✉ The Market Place small portion on the northern side, through which thread shoppers and mobility scooters heading elsewhere. In the empty part I spotted a very prominent police car, intriguingly empty and still present two hours later, thus presumably parked there as a deterrent. The monument in the centre is a later addition to commemorate local landowner Lord George Bentinck, but alas the shell was so ornate that the money ran out and the central space reserved for his statue remains empty. Don't think pavement cafes and alfresco drinking, but there is a branch of my favourite pastry chain Poundbakery where the lady behind the counter called me 'duck' as she sold me two apple puffs for a quid. ✉ The Quakers claims to fame is that the Quaker religion has its roots here, this because the initial revelation striking George Fox came during the English Civil War while he was walking past the parish church. ["And as I was walking by the steeple-house side in the town of Mansfield, the Lord said unto me, That which people do trample upon must be thy food."] His first nonconformist conversion was of a local woman called Elizabeth Hooton, who it's said inspired the idea of silent worship, and a first meeting house was established on land outside the town centre. In a careless civic act the Old Quaker Meeting House was demolished in 1973 to make way for a new ring road called Quaker Way and now lies somewhere underneath the town's bus station, thus the Mansfield Quaker Heritage Trail is mostly a tour of the long gone. ✉ The trunk road A38 is England's longest two-digit A road and is 292 miles long. One end is in Bodmin in Cornwall and the other is here in Mansfield, and has been since 1977 when the road designation was extended northeast from Derby. The monster road terminates at an otherwise insignificant T-junction between the Superbowl and Taco Bell, this because the remainder of Stockwell Gate from here to Market Place had already been pedestrianised. All the other main roads round here start with a 6 so this numerical interloper really stands out. The Bodmin end of the A38 is prettier to be honest, but is merely a service roundabout so it's much easier to buy zips, get botoxed and park your car at this end. ✉ The mining in the locality. At Clipstone on the outskirts of Mansfield the headstocks have been retained and ex-miners run guided tours on Fridays, while at Pleasley Pit the reclaimed mineworkings are now a country park with a visitor centre which opens daily except Tuesdays. I also missed out on the correct opening days for the Nottinghamshire Mining Museum which occupies part of Mansfield station, so instead had to make do with admiring the chunky 'Tribute to the British Miner' statue unveiled on the ring road in 2003. ✉ The shops Four Seasons shopping centre has seen better days and leans heavily into cheaper stores, and if you step out back the former Beale's department store is a hulking eyesore awaiting the cash to turn it into a regenerated council hub. The mall that most affected me was the Rosemary Centre, a former cotton doubling factory founded by the Cash family in 1906. In 1989 the ground floor became a terraced shopping mall of dubious architectural merit, home to Argos, Domino's and Slacks newsagents, but has been sequentially decanted and the derelict arcade now has a brutal ambience. The plan is to replace the sawtooth-roofed building with a huge Lidl to try to regain footfall, which makes huge economic sense but nobody will ever look at their grey shed and think wistfully of what used to be. ✉ The leftbehindness ✉ The Heritage Trail Mansfield Heritage Trail comes highly recommended. You can download it before you arrive or pick up a nicely-bound free copy at the museum. For me it explained why a bronze man was leaning on a stack of metal rings at the foot of Church Street, what the 7m-tall stainless steel high heels were doing by the railway viaduct and which seemingly classical building on Regent Street was really just the former Electricity Showroom. Eye-opening all round. » 20 photos of Mansfield on Flickr (it should be obvious where Chesterfield starts and Mansfield begins)

Pictograms 30 July - 9 November Japan House High Street Kensington admission free 2018 as a venue to share and celebrate Japanese culture and design. And what could be more Japanese than the pictogram - a suite of graphic symbols that convey meaning through symbolic representation? The latest exhibition celebrates their use but also aims to educate and foster a deeper understanding of graphic design, and is described as a masterclass in the simplicity of communicating without words. It's been set up in the basement so be aware the lift's currently not working, and it's a shame they wrote the 'Lift not in use' sign in words rather than displaying the message as a pictogram. giant black pictograms. It manages to be both the perfect selfie-backdrop and also fulsomely educational throughout, and I hope you won't mind if I focus on the latter. minimalist silhouette designs conjured up by Katsumi Masaru and Yoshiro Yamashita to guide visiting spectators to the correct sporting venue certainly made a lasting impact. Also it's a shame they went to all the effort of redesigning them again for the 2020 Games and thanks to the pandemic hardly any foreigners turned up. 176 emoji, each restricted to 12×12 pixels, and included twelve zodiac signs, five red hearts, two feline faces, a cutlery set and a rocking horse. What precisely would best depict an apple, for example, to ensure understanding across all boundaries and cultures? Should icons be depicted from the front, the side or looking down from on top, and all because the essence of a 3D object has to be condensed into a recognisable 2D representation? And if it's movement you're depicting, which part should be the snapshot you use? Looking at a silhouette walking, for example, it soon becomes clear that only one properly captures the intended motion. The exhibition ends with a do-it-yourself section. A bunch of London schoolchildren were asked to design their own pictograms on a square grid, and the professionally-tweaked results clearly resemble Tower Bridge, a wrap of fish and chips, a cargo bike and the intimate emotion 'I love my dog'. There's also a lightbox where you can shuffle shapes to make your own pictogram designs. I quickly knocked up the silhouette below to represent 'diamond geezer', although I confess to relying heavily on a shape the gallery assistants had laid out in advance and I am by no means that rotund in real life. exhibition's on until November, but ➨ 🇯🇵🏠︎ 🕙︎-🕗︎ 🔍︎ 👍︎☺

Gadabout: CHESTERFIELD Chesterfield is the largest town in Derbyshire, but only because Derby is a city. It lies 10 miles south of Sheffield, sandwiched between the Peak District and the M1 on the edge of an abandoned coalfield. But it's best known for the twisted spire of its parish church, a truly jarring sight on the local skyline, which I inevitably ended up taking far too many photos of. There are alas rather fewer other reasons to visit, at least at present while many attractions are being upgraded, but join me to discover a lot of half-timbered shops, a narrow canal, some street art, a tailoring pioneer and the Rocket man's last resting place. [Visit Chesterfield] [20 photos] The church with the wonky spire is St Mary and All Saints, not just the most famous church in all of Derbyshire but also the largest. It sits on slightly higher ground in an otherwise lowrise town, placing the pinnacle of engineering catastrophe on full public view. Not only does the spire have a 45 degree twist but the tip additionally leans 2.9 metres off centre which is how it manages to look impossibly awry from all angles. There are many stories to explain how the disfigurement occurred, many of them involving virgins and/or the Devil, but the most convincing reason is that when 14th century craftsmen installed insufficient cross-bracing they weren't anticipating the 17th century addition of 32 tons of lead sheeting. up by the shops. Get too close, say within the churchyard itself, and the optical illusion fades somewhat as the lines of perspective converge. The worst place to see it is of course inside the church itself, although you're welcome within and they run tours up the tower on Fridays and Saturdays for a tenner. It is indeed a fine old church, fundamentally medieval but extensively restored by Gilbert Scott in the 1840s, and fortuitously not destroyed in 1961 when a nasty fire came within 3 minutes of engulfing the spire. Do try to ignore the knitted blue sprite tied to the top of the font, an aberration that turns out to be part of a brazenly evangelical treasure hunt for kids. The spire gives its name to all sorts of local organisations and establishments. There's an office block called Spire Walk, a housing estate called The Spires, a new children's home called Spire House and a Spire Cycling Club founded in 1889. The local council features the spire prominently in its logo, more stylistically today than was once the case, and the nickname of League 2 stalwarts Chesterfield FC is 'The Spireites'. The most twisted incarnation I saw was an inking parlour on Sheffield Road called Crooked Spines Tattoo, which is perhaps pushing things too far as if Chesterfield were a one-idea creative town. » At this point I would have gone to the Tourist Information Centre outside but the council closed it last year, preferring to go digital-first to save money. The octagonal rotunda is now only used by roosting pigeons and is currently fenced off while workmen attack the paving outside. There were plans to bring the building back to life as a 'Crooked Spire Experience' but that never made it into the most recent regeneration plans so I assume the idea's dead. » At this point I would have gone to Chesterfield Museum but alas it's long-term closed. It's undergoing an 'ambitious' £17m transformation along with the Pomegranate Theatre nextdoor, and has been since 2022 when the planned reopening date was 2024. It's now 2026, and although I expect the end result will be impressive the temporary absence does substantially reduce the town's visitor draw. » At this point I would have gone to the Market Place, one of England's largest, but it was substantially sealed off. I watched workmen adding canopies for permanent stalls and making gaps in the paving for more trees, this part of the council's consolidation of the remaining traders into a smaller area. Admittedly the market doesn't normally operate on a Tuesday anyway, also the Market Hall is always open with its imposing Italianate tower and contemporary interior, but for the full Chesterfield experience it's basically come back later. The shops are pretty decent though, sprawled across a large pedestrianised area between the church and the Town Hall. Many are in attractive half-timbered premises, this because progressives chose to demolish several streets in the 1920s and the town architect at the time had a penchant for rebuilding in Tudor Revival style. Some of the finest black and white examples are along the delightfully-named Knifesmithgate, indeed stand on the corner with Packers Row and you could almost be in Chester, except the boutiques are less fancy and the most impressive turrety facade now conceals a Premier Inn. [Town Trail] [Black & White Trail] [54 page walk] The Yorkshire Building Society really does trade in a 16th century building, also the Peacock Inn just down the street which may once have been a Tudor Guildhall. The Royal Oak at the heart of The Shambles is even older, although the Victorians eradicated most of the surrounding enclave and all that remains is the twisty medieval street pattern. The most consequential shop must be Britain's first Burtons, opened in 1904 when a Lithuanian immigrant set up as a gentleman's outfitter on Holywell Street. He became Sir Montague Burton and tailored the nation from often-ornate premises, although the Chesterfield store on Burlington Street alas closed in 2016 and is now a particularly large branch of Greggs. The council have been installing public artwork around the town since 1994, including a purple resin puppy in Theatre Yard and a huge steel flower in the middle of the Horns Bridge roundabout. The two most significant works may be those tucked away behind the Future Walk building on West Bars, which is home to the Post Office's Finance Service Centre. One is a Barbara Hepworth called Curved Reclining Form - a tad smaller than I was expecting and with two limestone voids. Opposite is Poise by Angela Conner, seemingly a static stone disc but when it's windy the six strips flap independently and appealingly. Sorry, I should have taken a video rather than a photo. Across the main road is Queen's Park - part cricket ground, part lake, part kickabout and part sports centre. Here an unusual diamond sculpture celebrates the Queen's penultimate jubilee, each of 60 facets engraved with questionably significant events, including the opening of a nearby hospice, heavy local flooding and the founding of Twitter. Chesterfield's chief river is the Rother, the watercourse that ultimately gives Rotherham its name. It's rather slimmer up this end, almost peaceful, although the beginnings of a linear development zone are beginning to intrude with jaggedy houses and a very lonely-looking office block. This is also where the Chesterfield Canal begins, diverging at an insignificant bend in the woods before wiggling off to join the Trent near Gainsborough. I only walked as far as the first lock at Tatton Mill Bridge, a one-gate affair through an unnervingly narrow arch (as is the way on this very early canal). Technically the first five miles are navigable but after that a disused tunnel breaks the connection to the rest of the canal network so no, you can't bring a boat. The town's most famous resident may surprise you, that is unless you've spotted the statue outside the station of a man holding a prototype locomotive. It's George Stephenson, railway builder extraordinaire, who chose to spend the last ten years of his life living in Chesterfield. What drew him here initially was the North Midland Railway, then that while digging a tunnel near Clay Cross he discovered coal and iron deposits and made a pretty penny by establishing a company to exploit them. He lived at Tapton House, a grand brick mansion on Castle Hill overlooking the railway, before dying of pleurisy in 1848 and being buried in a vault at Holy Trinity across the valley. In 1925 a later resident gifted the house to the town along with its surrounding parkland. It's still free to wander round, apart from the golf course, although probably best not approached via the ridiculously steep footpath I clambered up. Tapton House spent many years as a boarding school and most recently council offices, although it's been empty since 2018 awaiting a new purpose. It was uncanny to walk through the great man's gates, past a horse-mounting block the great man likely used, to a carriage-turning loop in front of the great man's front door. What I also discovered was a planning application pinned to a post, its deadline recently passed, proposing turning the empty house and its immediate surroundings into 20 residential units. They'll be high-spec because living up here is not for paupers, and are described within the spiel as "A Harmonious Blend of Heritage and Modernity". But there'll also be security gates and private gardens so I doubt anyone'll be able to access George's back lawn quite as freely as I managed, before yomping back down the hill and catching his railway home.

East Midlands quiz Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Derbyshire A) Bigsofa B) Rugbolt C) Nicercub D) Localmatch E) Glancearea F) Typeamaze G) Ringereach H) Yearntasted I) Gossipvalue J) Glazesurgery K) Cookproperly L) Dollarsweight M) Babywrapjacket        Nottinghamshire N) Tiepigs O) Jobbribe P) Freshboat Q) Heavyhive R) Saganbulk S) Hispasture T) Openercost U) Simplymick V) Kanyespanwade W) Aboutmodelcar X) Directionhealthy Y) Schwarzenegger Z) Dividetimbertrees (answer in the comments box, and please no more than one guess each)

Hyperlocal Signage News Delays are expected to continue until October. It's probably related to the aforementioned sewer repairs. But it has a misplaced apostrophe. I wish someone would take it away.