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20 Things You Should Know About serviced offices stratford

• Posted by Eyman Enciso February 20, 2022 Filed in Other #office to rent stratford  #serviced offices stratford  30 views
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  Shakespeare's England

  ™

  From a passage by Mark Twain:

  "That beauty which is England is alone; it has no duplicate. It is made up of very simple details, just grass, and trees, and shrubs, and roads, and hedges, and gardens, and houses, and churches, and castles, and here and there a ruin, and over all a mellow dreamland of history. But it's beauty is More helpful hints incomparable and all it's own".

  From: Shakespeareland:

  It is a happy circumstance that the small town which may be described as the heart of England should be set in such rich but homely scenery as that of "leafy Warwickshire". It would not, perhaps, be easy to determine who first applied the epithet "leafy" to the county, but it is so happily descriptive, that one rarely thinks of the name of Warwickshire without the addition; and so, also, it is difficult to think of Stratford-upon-Avon without thinking of it as Shakespeare's Stratford. Citizens of the place may be able to think of it as a kind of town entity, but for others it is a background to one of the worlds greatest men, to the supreme poet and dramatist whose genius commands the homage of the whole civilised world. It is a background full of beauty and of deep interest, a little conventionalized, maybe, from being a show-place. Few can be those people "with souls so dead", to use Sir Walter Scott's familiar phrase, as to be unmoved by wandering about spots associated with the greatly admired great.

  The majority of visitors from afar reach Stratford-upon-Avon by railway, and the entries from the railway stations are perhaps those which give the least favourable first impression of the town. Especially is this the case with that from the Great Western Station, on the Alcester Road, leaving which, we find ourselves in a broad road, with the large general Hospital on our left, then new red-brick villas, and then flat-fronted, low, unpicturesque houses and shops rising from the foot walk. We have to pass along a road of strangely varying width, and might go right across the town from west to east - the one road having five names, Alcester Road, Greenhill Street, Wood Street, Bridge Street, and Bridge Foot - and come out on Clopton Bridge over the Avon without having any idea that we had passed through anything more than a quiet, comfortable market town of a kind not uncommon in the English Midlands.

  A glance at the shop windows, with their in-numerable picture-postcards and varied souvenirs, would have shown that the town was other than it seemed. A little way on our left we should have passed the central shrine of this centre of many shrines - the birthplace of William Shakespeare - while a glance to the right down the High Street, which branches off at the point where the narrowest part of our highway of Wood Street becomes the broad Bridge Street, would give glimpses of some more of the older buildings of the town. When our traveller, whom we have presumed to be ignorant of the significance of Stratford, came to Clopton Bridge, looking downstream he would see a striking building by the waterside - a building of red brick and white stone, a building of high-pitched green-slated roof and many turrets and small gables. Such a building, in such a town, would surely pique our traveller's curiosity, and he would find on enquiry that it is the Shakespeare Memorial. Beyond, further down the river, he would see the spire of Stratford Church rising from amid trees - the church in which Shakespeare is buried - and he would surely wish at one to linger in and about the town that had at a first glance appeared to have little that was especially attractive.

  Clopton Bridge itself may well detain us. It is a fine stone structure of many arches, with low parapets, over which we have delightful scenes up and down the course of the soft-flowing Avon, the windings of which give us but short views of the water, while the low-lying meadows are backed by the greenery of Warwickshire's ever-present trees. Looking downstream, towards the Memorial and Church, we see the old bridge is close-neighboured by another one of red brick, built for carrying a disused railway, and said to be one of the earliest of our railway bridges, a fact which may lessen our impatience at its obstructing the view downstream, and also for obstructing our view of the fine old bridge when we look upstream from the playing-fields on the left bank of the Avon.

  Here it may be said that an old-time Stratford clergyman derived the name of Avon from a "British word, aufona, with them signifying as much as fluvius with us". The river was spanned by an old wooden bridge, across which unsupported tradition says that Queen Matilda led her troops; but this was removed by one of Stratford's more notable citizens and replaced by the current stone bridge, iron plates on which record its building and its repairing and widening in the early part of the last century. Until the widening there stood on it a stone pillar with the following sufficient story: "Sir Hugh Clopton, Knight, Lord Mayor of London, built this bridge at his own proper expense in the reign of King Henry ye Seventh".

  To the Avon we shall return. Going eastward again by Bridge Foot and Bridge Street, that we may visit the shrine associated with the memory of one who is not only Stratford's, but England's most famous son, we pass up the wide Bridge Street, and find the way forks on either side of plain white, many-windowed bank premises. The left road is Wood Street, by which we came from the railway station. The right is Henley Street, a short thoroughfare, two-thirds of the way along which we reach a neat and very picturesque timbered and gabled house rising, as most of the houses do in these older Stratford ways, straight from the street. This is "The Birthplace". On either side of it is now garden ground, preserved open that the shrine may be less liable to any danger from fire, from which the town thrice suffered severely during the lifetime of Shakespeare. On the last of these occasions - July. 1614 - no fewer than fifty four dwelling-houses were destroyed, so that it is no doubt largely to those fires we owe it that there are not more of the Tudor buildings standing. Fortunately, among those spared are those most interesting.

  To gain admittance to the house the necessary ticket must be obtained at the cottage immediately to the east, the office of the Trustees and Guardians of Shakespeare's Birthplace. Though brick-fronted and much altered, this cottage was standing in the poet's time, his neighbours there resident being of the name of Horneby.

  The Birthplace itself is one of the chief shrines of the town, a place annually visited by many thousands of people from all over the world. From it's small rooms, it's tiny irregular staircase, we may easily imagine how comfortable citizens lived in the spacious days of great Elizabeth; in the fine collection of documents and books, signatures, mementoes, and curios, we get glimpses more directly personal to Shakespeare himself, his family, and the people whom he knew. Upstairs we are in the very room in which, on April 23rd, 1564, the poet first saw the light. Here generations of visitors scrawled their names, in accordance with a bad old habit to which Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens fell victims. Now the autograph record of those who visit the house is duly kept in a visitor's book provided for the purpose.

  It is not possible for anyone gifted with imagination to be in these rooms unmoved - rooms in which the poet was born, in which he passed what we may well believe was a happy childhood, from which he went to the Grammar School about a quarter of a mile off, and from which he went a-courting a mile across the fields to Shottery. Of intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's personality we may have but little, of the story of his life much may be surmise, but, here, at least, we can feel that we see rooms much as he saw them, though in place of the simple furnishings of Tudor times we have in some of the rooms the omnium gatherum of a museum. It is a museum full of interest to the student of Shakespeareana, and tempts the visitor to linger over the sight of copies of books which the poet himself might have read, over his and other old signatures to legal documents, over the celebrated "Ely" portrait of Shakespeare, over pictures, plans, and other relics of bygone Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Little as we know of the details of Shakespeare's life story, the history of his birthplace, from possessor to possessor, is fortunately complete from the time of his birth up to the purchase of the house by the nation in 1847. It is true that there have not been wanting theorists who have sought to prove that his birth did not actually take place here, but circumstantial evidence strongly supports the belief that it did. Here his father, John Shakespeare, lived, and here carried on his business of wood stapler and glover. The immediate surroundings have changed with improving conditions, for in the sixteenth century the elder Shakespeare was fined for keeping a muck-heap outside his street door! Now Henley Street is a neat and pleasant thoroughfare, though modernity is marked by a motor garage a little to the west, and passing along the street on a Saturday evening I have noticed, if not an ancient, certainly a fish-like smell from a fried-fish shop nearly opposite the Birthplace, while from the end of Henley Street have come the strains of a Salvation Army hymn. Even in Stratford men cannot live on sentiment.

  Passing out at the back door of the house, we are in a garden, the guardians of which have made it a peculiarly interesting one by planting in it representatives of all flowers and trees named by the poet in his