Lichfield; Sunday, 27 October, 2024

With the clocks going back overnight I had an extra-long lie in before heading down to breakfast and then packing my bag before checking out and heading out into the city to do some more exploring.

My first stop of the morning was the nearby Beacon Park, a large park on the Western side of the city, which stretches for a long distance, but I was only interested in the part of the park closest to the cathedral for it’s two statues to two very different Edwards. There is the typical stone statue dedicated to Edward VII the monarch who was otherwise known as Dirty Bertie for some of his behaviour when he was younger. Staring into his back from across the fountain in the centre of this part of the park is the metal statue of Captain Edward Smith. Born in Hanley in what is now Stoke-on-Trent he became the most important of the White Star Line captains and so was chosen to captain their newest and most unsinkable ship – The RMS Titanic. Smith, as any good captain would, died going down with his ship as the disaster unfolded in the North Atlantic. Because he was born in the diocese of Staffordshire it was decided to place his statue in Lichfield as it is the centre of the diocese.

A short walk away from the park is the house of Erasmus Darwin, a badly forgotten genius who was a physician, philosopher, inventor, poet, enlightened thinker and decades ahead of his time – postulating a theory of evolution more than 70 years before his own grandson, Charles Darwin, would write On the Origin of Species. His house is today a museum to the man and his prodigious work over his life, including many years at the start of his career in Lichfield.

After taking in the museum I walked the short distance through the narrow passageways into the Vicars Close, the former housing for the vicars of the cathedral, located just feet from the building, but inside the sun trap courtyard a world away from everything else.

From there it was a short walk down to the Stowe Pool. Originally a mill pond providing a steady supply of water to a nearby water wheel, the pond was upgrade to reservoir in the middle of the 19th century, but with increasing pressure on the water supply and the need to improve facilities it lost that role in the late 1960s, reverting to duck pond and pleasant water feature that you can walk around in about 20 minutes. From the far end there are some of the best views of the spires of the cathedral, and on a nice sunny day like today it was possible to see through the openings in the main spire to see the light on the other side of the stonework.

I wandered back into town and headed over to the final stop of my journey, at the house of the man most associated with the City – Dr Samuel Johnson. The bookshop and bookbinders workshop that his father – Michael Johnson – owned in the centre of the city, by the market place has been preserved, and on the first floor is the room in which Samuel Johnson entered the world. The museum looks at his life and works and on the top most floor is a display case housing his most important work – a two volume set of his English Dictionary the first dictionary in the language that gave accurate and referenced definitions for words.

Having looked round the museum and a bit more of a wander round the city centre I stopped for a late lunch before heading back over to the hotel to pick up my luggage and start the, given it was a Sunday afternoon, inevitably lengthy journey back home.