Let’s just say that I am now quite familiar with the handful of places in the UK that begin with Q. Unfortunately many are in Northernmost Scotland, quite a number comprise three houses and a dog, and there’s one which Google Streetview swears blind is a field (in Staffordshire – as it happens it’s right next to Alton Towers, but that would have seemed like cheating…) Once I’d whittled these down, there wasn’t a lot left…
Saturday morning sees an early start, mainly because I’d seen Eggs Benedict on a breakfast menu. And just under a couple of hours later we find ourselves seated in a charmingly retro café overlooking a canal marina. We are in Quorn in Leicestershire, and yes the pseudo-mince product was named after it apparently. But there is no myco-protein on the menu here, mainly animal based cholesterol , and very good it is too. We’re here for the food, but take a stroll around the marina. 
It produces few surprises other than the typically awful boat names ( ‘River Soar Fingers’ – why?) and a unusually located chicken run neatly fitted between the four legs of a huge electricity pylon. Apparently the chickens are fine with this, but if you lay their eggs on a smooth table they will all rotate to indicate magnetic North. I also get briefly excited thinking I’ve spotted a quail, but it’s actually just a large chick.
Poking around Quorn following breakfast reveals a charming little town with a large park and a memorial to the American division stationed there during WWII. Next to this is a giant wooden carving of a bear. Was this also stationed here? Maybe a clerical error of some kind – ‘The troops need BEER. Send BEER…’ Apart from this, the main amusement to be had consists of simply looking at the names of the shops. Turns out nearly anything is funnier with the word ‘Quorn’ in front of it.
Retreating from the town centre before the locals get really annoyed by our pointing and sniggering, we arrive at Quorn station – one of four on the splendidly preserved Great Central Railway. As they are very keen to point out, this line stands out as the only preserved section of mainline steam railway in the country. What this means in practice is that, if you time it right, you can be in one steam hauled train going one direction, whilst another thunders past in the opposite direction. Unless they screw up the points, one assumes. We are here to recreate the iconic car/train contests initiated by rich Bentley-boys in the thirties and more recently popularised by Clarkson and his mates. As epic races go, this is not particularly epic: The family are booked on the eight minutes past eleven service due to pull into Loughborough seven minutes later. Meanwhile Soupy Dave trundles North at a sedate thirty miles an hour. In practice the train wins by miles, as I get distracted on the way back to the car park by photo-ops, but in Top Gear tradition we can pretend it was a nail biting race to the wire. Like James May, I refuse to run.
The terminus in Loughborough is one of the nicest preserved stations I’ve seen, all wood panelling and evocative signage. There is also access to the engine sheds where a cheerful bunch of volunteers appear to be trying to restore forty locomotives all at once. Not for the first time I am struck by how many volunteers seem to be available to do this sort of thing, given the number of these railways that exist. Is this why British manufacturing is still languishing? All the people with engineering skills seem to be having far too much fun rebuilding steam locomotives.
Luckily for someone trying to plan a Q-themed day, nearly every British town has a ‘Queen’s Park’, and Loughborough is no exception. This is the scheduled lunch stop, but due to a slight culinary miscalculation no-one really fancies the egg-mayonnaise sandwiches we’d brought, having eaten our monthly egg quota at breakfast. So instead we explore the park. And it’s a good one. Not large, but within its boundaries it crams in an excellent playground, various water features, maze, museum, café, aviary and the second carillon of the year. All are interesting. The presence of a quail in the aviary is an unexpected triumph, especially given the false alarm in Quorn earlier. There is also the giant casting of the bell from St Pauls cathedral in the middle of a flowerbed. The museum turns out to be an enthusiastic celebration of everything all at once. There is a biplane hanging from the roof and a dinosaur skeleton under the floor amongst other things, and whilst I can’t detect any coherent theme, I’m not sure it matters. It is free as well, which is nice and probably shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Having done the park and eaten everything in the cool box which didn’t contain egg, we leave Leicestershire in search of another Q. Coincidentally Quorn was renamed from it’s original ‘Quorndon’ due to confusion with our next destination: ‘Quarndon’ just to the North of Derby. I will not pretend that there is much here. It’s an affluent but unremarkable leafy commuter suburb of Derby with one slightly disinterested pub serving the kind of shandy that tastes faintly of fairy liquid. We visit the site of a spring that Daniel Defoe once frequented. I imagine he visited a number of places in his varied life, and doubt he remembered this one to the extent that they remembered him. He perhaps at least got a drink though. Doesn’t appear to be any water in it now. But we will not leave Quarndon empty-handed memory wise for just outside the village lies Kedleston Hall.
Men are prone to showing off. We do it in all kinds of ways – flash cars, trophy wives, pretending you own the yacht just behind you in holiday photos. Generally reprehensible behaviour. But if you are going to do it, best to go all out. Kedleston Hall was built by Nathaniel Curzon, former Viceroy of India as a massive ‘look at me’. He had no intention of even living here – this is a palace built purely to entertain guests and show off his eclectic collections. In this respect it is quite unusual as a National Trust property in that it’s raison d’etre is essentially the same now as it was when built. And it succeeds spectacularly, if tastelessly. The halls are full of vast columns, the furniture gilded to within an inch of its life. Even the curlicues have curlicues. Bedposts look like palm trees, sofas are supported on mermaids. The bits that aren’t gold are mainly turquoise damask, which he obviously liked a lot. This isn’t a style that has proved particularly influential unless you count Indian restaurants, but is worth experiencing.
Outside he seemed to lose interest a bit. The promising sounding ‘pleasure gardens’ turn out to consist of a lot of lawn with a single fountain, an urn and a statue of a lion, not so much arranged as abandoned. This is improved not-at-all by a small hut containing the sort of video installation that involves a lot of jump-cuts and a soundtrack of three people humming. Will people please stop encouraging these artists? If they were any good at making films they’d either be in the cinema or on BBC4. If you find your work in a shed on a drizzly lawn next to a stone lion with a football? That’s not a good sign…
That would be it, were it not for an amusing interlude where I turn Dave into a giant metal seesaw by beaching it on one of the grassy banks separating the car parking spaces. Photo is included for your amusement. Luckily, National Trust members are noted for their physical prowess and we are soon on our way. Q turned out to be a cracking day out, a lot more successful than anticipated, and I am filled with possibly false optimism as we progress inexorably towards the knotty problems of X and Z.
SoupyDave 