Saturday, May 10, 2014

[jules' pics] Seaside

Jocks nose-1
Apparently this, above, is Jock's nose. It is located near St Abbs on the SE coast of Scotland. I am not sure where the rest of Jock is. Whether he is in England or Scotland could become a matter of great importance later in the year, when Scotland votes on whether to leave the UK.
StAbbs-1-2
The father and sister in law admiring the view. The sister in law is just back from near death experiences in Antarctica so she was happy to see, through her binoculars, the penguins nesting on the red cliffs over yonder.
StAbbs-1
(Actually they were guillemots).
Finally another property question. Is it just our NIMBYism, or does one of these houses look a bit out of place?
ColdinghamSands-1
Hint: it can be yours for just 1.5Million UKP.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 5/10/2014 08:21:00 PM

8 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

£1.5M? I thought they paid you to take houses off their hands oop north.

James Annan said...

Maybe you could swap your fenland shoebox for it when you give up pretending to work for a living :-)

guthrie said...

Hey, that's my old holiday spot.

No wonder the rock in the first photo looked familiar. But it won't matter in the referendum, unless Jock is much much large than the size of his nose would suggest, since it is 4 or 5 miles to the border.

No, you're right, the expensive glass piece of shit has caused an outcry amongst the locals, beceause it turns out to be much larger and more intrusive than it was claimed before it was built.

William - wrong north, you're thinking of the north of England. Scotland has many houses worth more than 1.5 million, and frankly paying that much for a glass and steel monstrosity, albeit with a good view, is some cheek, hopefully they'll not sell or they'll go bust or something.

Davo said...

What the modern glass box? I have to admit I didn't notice it as my eye was drawn more to the eyesores on the hill behind it and what appears to be a row of charity bins along the beach front.

jules said...

Davo:

Well, that was my point really. It is all in the eye of the beholder. Everything else there, from the freakish habit for bathing in icy temperatures, to the eyesores on the hill and the charity bins on the beach are of a slightly frightening, but certainly characterful Victorian stylee. Thus Elisabethan glass boxes have no place. But from another point of view, which is that from above the glass box, the new place is incredibly ugly, as from that angle it appears as just a huge grey wall. Hopefully the trees will soon grow tall to hide it. The really funny thing about the box, however, it that the only access is down a rather long footpath that twiddles down from the car park (you can see it on my pic). Even in Japan, where, unlike the UK, no one is afraid to walk, places with no car access get sold off rather cheaply.

guthrie said...

Davo- the bins you refer to are old beach huts, much loved by their owners, and many are probably older than you are. They help families get away and have a decent time beside the beach, giving somewhere to shelter from the cold wind or rain and keep some things like a wee stove or such.
Moreover they are built of wood, and as such easily removed from site when required, unlike the glass box which will no doubt have concrete foundations and a lot of structural iron work.


(Declaration of interest - I spent many weeks there as a child and my family used to own a beach hut on the headland to the right (east) of where this photograph was taken. Ours managed to survive for years longer than the others there)

Davo said...

Jules I have to admit that I'm probably not the best judge of these things. Mostly because my beach eye has been calibrated by a childhood of summers at the beach near my grandparent's holiday house (caution looks can be deceiving, this is the NSW South Coast and that water is much, much more bracing than it appears). I honestly didn't see the new house the first time and I ventured into the comments to find out what was the problem.

The view from the street is terrible and doesn't really fit with the rest of the building. On one side they seem to be going for a lightweight winged look but then it's mashed into a pile of rocks at the back. Makes you wonder why they didn't just cut it back into the hill. As you said the trees will hopefully hid this from the street side, but I'd be more worried about what the double garage will look like when the new owner's builds one.

Guthrie I think it's a bit like "our nan". Now our nan is wonderful, we like having her around and love her dearly--none of which makes her in any way aesthetically pleasing.

guthrie said...

Indeed, the old beach huts were built in a time when aesthetically pleasing was usually a matter for the intelligentsia and suchlike, rather than the plebs, who used any old scrap wood, hammered out tin cans to make reinforcements and help in water proofing etc.
On the other hand the overpriced greenhouse has no such excuse.