Finding a pint down the sides of the sofa

A chilly winter’s night in Sheffield, the fourth largest city in England and the hidden metropolis of the county of South Yorkshire. Tucked between seven hills, just out of sight of the M1 motorway and between the two principal north-south main line railways of Great Britain, it’s no wonder that the city is often overlooked by native Brits.

Sheffield was a city built on the steel industry, an industry which collapsed and re-developed, and which now churns out more steel than at any point in the history of the city. But preconceptions about the city stuck, and Sheffield has now evolved into a quietly proud modern city, with two university’s and a healthy economy of service based industries. The mass employers are no longer the steel mills, but the technology and customer service companies that have sprung up around the edges of the compact city centre. The well educated graduate workforce seems to prefer to stay in the city after finishing their higher level studies, and with house prices on the up, Sheffield is managing to temper the senseless loft apartment boom of Leeds or Manchester with a lively music scene and cultural landscape that has no difficulty in being proudly different.

The centre of Sheffield can easily be criticised for the lack of interesting historical neighbourhoods. But looking closer it can more rewarding to unpick and unpeel the overlapping layers of successive masterplans: redevelopments that were planned to revitalise the city for a generation that was yet to be born. Around the fabulously cheap shopping precint of the Moor, such stained and rusting fifties architectural treats at this Grosevnor House Hotel hark bark to a rapidly disappearing era of tectonic concrete blocks and inhospitable underpasses: a miniature and more loveable recreation of Birmingham’s dreadful (and now demolished) sixties Bullring. Just a few hundred metres away, the next ‘new’ Sheffield is being finished and pushed into the public domain. The established city centre Peace Gardens have now been extended with new commercial developments on the site of the old City Council buildings. Perched incromprehensibly and insensitively between the Peace Gardens and the attractive glazed glu-lam hall of the indoor Winter Gardens is Sheffield’s latest white elephant: the Macdonald St. Paul’s Hotel. This four star hotel seems to have been built the wrong way round, with its reception area facing the Peace Gardens. A nice civic gesture, you might think, but a nightmare for those arriving by car or taxi: an automated bollard blocks the only road that accesses this entrance, and the appearance of the inelegant flat facade of the building does the city centre no favours at all.

So on just such a cold winter’s night, it’s reassuring to find that the ‘old’ Sheffield is still here, in the constantly changing, constantly ‘regenerated’ city centre. On Norfolk Street, a stone’s throw from the Macdonald St. Paul and less than ten minutes walk from the railway station is the Brown Bear. This two room pub has managed to hold out, not only from sweeping redevelopment of it’s higgledy-piggledy block, but also from comprehensive takeover by monopolistic chain pubs. The decor on both sides of the pub (divided by the single island bar) reminds you immediately of your location: dozens of old theatre and pantomime posters have been collaged to paper the walls, and that’s only appropriate considering the large number of theatre-goers who come for a pre- or post-theatre drink. But stay a little longer, and you’ll find a much more varied clientelle. The variety of accents will remind you of Sheffield’s different neighbourhoods and the occasional clump of students will have you checking your change the first time you order at the bar. Associated solely with the Tadcaster Brewery, the pub only sells drinks produced or marketed by that brewery. And while you might bemoan the absence of your favourite homogenous international lager, you should at least try Tadcaster’s finest. At the time of writing, a pint of Sovereign Bitter was just £1.31. I was able to get the first round in using the small change I’d been collecting in various trouser pockets at home. Until I hear otherwise, the Brown Bear retains my recommendation as both Sheffield’s cheapest and most honest city centre pub.

Breakfast? Follow the hi-vis jackets

The area around the two London railway terminals of King’s Cross and St. Pancras stations is a-buzz almost twenty-four hours a day with ongoing construction work for the imminent arrival of international Eurostar services. Britain’s first dedicated high speed rail line (optimistically numbered CTRL1, in case we ever get round to building another) will soon be open to passenger traffic, flying through Kent from the Channel Tunnel, skirting around the capital, past the east London site of the 2012 Olympics and into the newly refurbished and extended St. Pancras station on the northern side of the city centre. Journey times will be shorter and connections to other parts of Britain will be improved.

While all this construction work continues, a massive workforce of contractors, builders and labourers are on site building the new infrastructure. Finding myself at St. Pancras early one Sunday morning, the building site between St. Pancras and King’s Cross is already crowded with men about to start work. There isn’t really a uniform as such, but everyone is wearing a luminescent high-visibility yellow jacket and hard helmet. Originally designed to make sure workers could be seen on site by those operating heavy machinery, they’ve effectively become a cloak that symbolises inconspicuity in the city. Next time you’re in London, count the number of yellow jackets that you see in a short walk. They’re everywhere, and yet we’ve become so used to them they no longer catch our attention.

I have just arrived back in London after two weeks in Canada and America. Having already been delayed by two days, I’m eager to get on my train and go home. But being a penny pinching self-supporting traveller, I booked a cheap train ticket that is restricted to the service I specified when I reserved. Whereas I allowed for a safe cushion to get from Heathrow to St. Pancras, we actually arrived early and I’ve managed to ride the tube into London in less than an hour. With time to kill until my train leaves for Sheffield at 10h30, I need something to eat. With the redevelopment of King’s Cross and St. Pancras, the whole neighbourhood around the two stations is being gentrified. It was never a particularly savoury place to find yourself, and undoubtedly the powers of commercial development have seen that there could be good money to be made in tarting up the future arrival point for European tourists and business travellers. So standing outside King’s Cross on the corner of the Euston Road and York Way, I am already disgusted to find generic chain coffee bars popping up. After a fortnight away in the land of real diners, real fast food and real baristas, the last thing I want is a tepid over roasted Starbucks and an overpriced stale pastry. I’m British, damnit, and I want some grease in the morning…

It’s a beautiful winter’s Sunday morning, with a clear blue sky above me and a mild fresh bite to the air. It’s not yet seven thirty, and for a few moments I just stand on the corner, yearning for the ideal greasy spoon ‘caff’ to magically appear in place of the McDonald’s restaurant that has occupied a prime retail location near-by.

But then I realise that the answer is all around me. Where builders congregate, builders find greasy spoons. And I notice a small but promising stream of yellow hi-vis jackets heading east down the Pentonville Road.

I sneak off in hot (if silent) persuit. And within one hundred metres, I’ve struck gold. Adjacent to the King’s Cross Thameslink station on Pentonville Road (at number 275) is the Modern Snack Bar. A diminuitive facade opens to reveal a handful of tables with refilled bottles of tomato ketchup and laminated menus. A few very content contractors in hi-vis jackets bearing the slogan ‘CTRL’ are already tucking in. The Italian proprietor is talking animatedly with a friend, while a young waitress serves. I’m barely on the chair before I’ve decided what I’m having. For £4.75, I’ve found a proper English breakfast in the heart of King’s Cross. With a mug of hot, sweet milky tea and a groaning plate of bacon, sausage, beans, eggs and mushrooms, my first day back in Britain has been kick started.

So next time you have a hankering for some greasy English morning cuisine, you know which colour jackets you need to follow.

95 up

Any self-respecting travel guide to Chicago will tell you (and I can almost guarantee this without exception) that while the observatory on the ninety-fourth floor of the John Hancock Centre is a great viewing point from which to see the city, you can get the same view on the adjacent ninety-fifth floor for the price of a drink.

As you can imagine, the drinks in the ninety-fifth floor Signature Lounge (11h00 – 00h30, 01h30 at weekends, www.signatureroom.com) are sold at marginally inflated prices, and the service is hardly worthy of the fifteen percent you’ll be adding to tab, but then that’s not the reason you come here.

Ascending from the building’s basement lobby on North Michigan Avenue, the elevator rattles at speed all the way to the top. I’ve experienced smoother elevators in university buildings a quarter the height of the Hancock Centre, but since I’m in the company of an elevator full of relaxed and chatty Mexican waiters, I’m reassured that the ride is always this bumpy. Alighting at the ninety-fifth floor, you can look down immediately to the double height restaurant space, in use tonight for a charity fund raiser. The disconcerting view down one level and out through the windows of the floor below me sends me knees into spasms, but I manage to stagger round (eagering resting one vertiginous hand on the inner wall of the corridor) to the main bar, which occupies the complete western side of the building at this height.

Visiting after dark on this unseasonably warm and therefore rainy January evening, the view is utterly breathtaking. In the same way that the Empire State Building offers a view set back from the main cluster of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the Hancock Centre was deliberately placed outside the dense downtown core of skyscrapers and office buildings. This sacrifice in location means the view is even more spectacular: the tight downtown pile of steel and glass skyscrapers can be seen in one glance from here, including the dizzying heights of the 443 metre Sears Tower. The Sears Tower is taller than the Hancock Centre by several storeys, and the competing SkyDeck observatory is a similarly popular tourist destination. But on a night like tonight, with scattered rain clouds scudding over Chicago at a speed that confirms the city’s nickname, the top of the Sears Tower is hidden in cloud. We seem to be at just the right height for a clear view out onto the orange lights of the Windy City.

My first visit to Chicago was almost five years ago, when a connecting flight brought me through O’Hare Airport en route to western Canada. My first taste of the United States of America was an airport that I couldn’t leave for fear of missing my onward flight. A long trans-Atlantic flight spent strapped into a middle-block seat of a widebody jetliner was finally concluded with a striking view out across the laps of my fellow passengers. We approached the airport directly parallel to the city’s grid of streets, and for a few brief moments before landing, the windows to my left and right framed a perspective of parallel streets flashing past, all pointing towards invisible vanishing points on distant horizons. From up here, my visit to Chicago is suddenly brought into remarkable clarity. The vast grid of right angled streets is laid out before me and marked out with orange streetlights.

The Signature Lounge is packed tonight. There are tourists from Japan, Australia and Holland. Everyone takes their turn upon arrival to edge towards the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the bar, and to peer out over the narrow triple glazed edge to the streets and diminutive neighbouring buildings below. I like neither heights not cognac, but in order to make the most of this view, I drink slowly and gradually acclimatise to both.

Slick and the six centimetre sandwich

Some of my itineraries have seen me changing trains in some slightly unexpected places. It’s all very well spending a layover of a few hours in a big city, but it’s quite often more enjoyable to discover something of a smaller town when you have time to kill between connections.

Schenectady, New York is one such place. I didn’t know of this small town until I started planning a major train trip around the USA last year. It’s the recommending connection point for passengers travelling between Montréal and Chicago. Unfortunately for anyone in the windy city who fancies a train trip to Montréal, the connection only works going west; the east bound ‘Lake Shore Limited’ misses the north bound ‘Adirondack’ by several hours. Although I suppose you could spend the night here.

This is how I first found Schenectady, in April 2006, en route from Montréal to the west coast of the USA. The full post is here.

Schenectady is a tidy little town, and a good example of the peaceful middle America I’m happy to experience for a few hours between trains. The station is small, with the tracks up on a raised embankment through the town centre, and with a small one-box station below. After leaving my bags safe in the station with the friendly attendant (definitely a good mood day for Amtrak staff) I head out to stretch my legs on a short tour of the town. Schenectady’s biggest feature is that it’s the home of General Electric, and also of Thomas Edison. Although as my USA By Rail handbook explains, that’s not how he started life.

Edison’s first job was selling sweets to railroad passengers, money from which he spent on chemistry sets and building a telegraph system out of scrap metal.

Just behind the station you’ll find the Edison Exploratorium (I think that means museum) but’s only available to visit by appointment, according to a sign in the window. I walk for an hour or two, buy some stamps from a stubborn vending machine that doesn’t like my dollar bills, and then look for a place to sit down for a while. While exploring the smaller tree lined streets on the other side of the station, I find a small saloon called Slick’s Bar and Restaurant. It’s more bar and restaurant, though Slick seems to be doing good business with his sandwiches. I’m assuming it was Slick that I saw, because his hair was indeed particularly slick.

I drank a bottle of Samuel Adams, and watched the CBS Evening News that was on a television screen behind the bar. Tonight’s top stories: the average price of gasoline across the States is now $2.86 a gallon (a bargain in the UK); the prices of building materials such as copper and plastic has increased dramatically in the last few months (apparently because of China’s economic boom… all I can say is that you should go into any Wal-Mart and you’ll see straightaway why there’s a boom in China); and also… an exclusive helmet mounted camera view of an Iraqi soldier’s duty in Iraq. I kid you not…

I am delighted to find Slick’s Restaurant again (click here for address and directions). It’s less than five minutes from Amtrak’s centrally located depot, and the small bar is a perfect place to spend some time between trains. Slick isn’t in attendance today, but a friendly waitress takes our order for two sandwiches (which have apparently made the restaurant famous). I take my time examing the unusually wide selection of bottled beers that are on sale, and settle for a not-too-distantly brewed Vermont Porter, which quickly recovers my faith in real American brewing.

This is my travelling companion’s first visit to the USA. She is slightly perterbed but not unsurprised when our sandwiches arrive. Between two thin slices of white bread are crammed dozens of freshly sliced and tightly packed wafers of meat. I chose ham and she chose beef: both sandwiches each way about as much as my Lonely Planet guidebook to the USA, and take almost as long to consume. Neither of us make it onto the second diagonal half of our sandwiches, and almost with a sense of satisfaction, our waitress offers to wrap them for us. We each mumble an acknowledgement of defeat, pay the bill, and scuttle off into the night.

Nonetheless, I look forward to my next layover in Schenectady.