#dailyat6am, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Travel, United Kingdom, Wild Horses

The Belfast Bean Stalk

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Daily Photo – Victoria Square Shopping Centre

To clean and tidy up the city, Belfast officials poured £400 million pounds into a new complex which they named Victoria Square Shopping Centre. The crowning glory of the entire complex was a huge glass dome that sat an impressive 45 metres off the ground and provided an impressive 360-degree panoramic view of the Belfast skyline.

As impressive as all this was, the thing about building a viewing platform 40 metres in the air, under 635 panes, providing a 360-degree view of the city, is that once it is there, you have to get people up there to use it! This was solved by constructing what looks like a space-age plant from a futuristic version of ‘Jack and the Bean Stalk’. So everyone could see the wondrous complex on their way to the top, a glass elevator was installed so shoppers could soak up the vista on the way up, while a glass spiral staircase was wrapped around the outside for those feeling a bit more enthusiastic.

Earlier in the day, my wife and I had met up with a close family friend from home who happened to be in Belfast too, largely because she grew up in a village just down the road. Faced with the choice of catching up over coffee or joining me for a hike to the top of the dome to see the skyline, they had opted for the coffee, agreeing we’d all regroup once I’d finished.

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Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, Wild Horses

The Dome

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Daily Photo – The Solar Sail in the Belfast Dome

When Belfast needed a central city upgrade after the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998,they poured £400 million pounds into a new complex which they named Victoria Square Shopping Centre. Its designers had ambitious and lofty goals with the crowning glory of the entire complex – the cherry on top if you will – was a huge glass dome that sat an impressive 45 metres off the ground. Made up of 635 individual triangular panes of glass held in place by a massive steel framework weighing 200,000 kilograms – it was the equivalent of roughly 40 adult elephants floating effortlessly above the city. When finished, the dome provided an impressive 360-degree panoramic view of the Belfast skyline, which the public could enjoy from a public viewing platform, offering views that stretch from the historic Belfast City Hall and the contours of Cavehill, all the way across to the towering yellow Harland and Wolff cranes in the Titanic Quarter.

The only problem with all of this was that engineers quickly discovered during the design process that what they had created was in actual fact a giant hotplate above the streets of Belfast. On the rare occasions that Belfast had a sunny day, the dome would act as a massive glasshouse and without intervention, the viewing platform and streets below would become unbearably hot. The solution was a stroke of genius. Instead of pulling the whole thing apart, the solution came in the form of a simple rotating fabric solar sail designed to track the sun throughout the day, filtering out the intense glare and heat of the Belfast sun, naturally regulating the open-air microclimate below so everyone could happily go about their day without having to worry about being burnt to a crisp or spontaneously combusting while shopping for socks!

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Braintree, England, Essex, Travel, United Kingdom, Wild Horses

Pig’s Head In The Pottage Pot Gant

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Pig’s Head in the Pottage Pot Gant (Google Street view)

In the 16th Century, a large number of Flemish weavers started migrating, making their way over to English places such as Lancashire, Yorkshire and Essex (including Braintree). As they did so, they turned the area into a major weaving region. In Braintree, where the buildings are tightly packed together, all sorts of alleyways were created that twisted and turned, eventually arriving at the old market square, where goods were sold. However, instead of being called alleyways, the paths were called ‘gants’, taken from the Flemish word ‘gang’ which meant corridor. So, in the town of Braintree, there are lots of small ‘gants’ throughout the town centre, one of which is called the ‘Pig’s Head in the Pottage Pot Gant‘. 

The usual name for this gant has been derived over history. In the deeds from the area dated 1753, an inn is referred to in the gant with the name of “Dogshead in the Porridge Pott” and over the passing of time, it morphed into its current name.