BGTW visit to Ironbridge

The BGTW Committee and officers were invited to Ironbridge Gorge Museum for their annual trip away. Roger Bray fills in the details.

In the Victorian surroundings of Blists Hill an intriguing question came to mind: if Britain had not dissipated the industrial knowledge and power created at Ironbridge, would today's travel writers be having such a tough time making ends meet? In other words, is recession biting with particular ferocity in the UK because we have replaced so much manufacturing capacity with financial services?

We had come to Ironbridge Gorge, however, with an eye to the future. The management of that UNESCO World Heritage Site, a great complex of historical industrial infrastructure and museums in Shropshire, had agreed to “bury” the Guild's Time Capsule, a collection of documents and artefacts from the world of travel in our 50th anniversary year, sealed in a state of the art Samsonite suitcase which is not to be opened until 2060. The group included committee members and our immediate chair and vice chair, Melissa Shales and Mary Anne Evans, which played such major parts in organising our half century celebrations.

Why Ironbridge? Not least because Blists Hill, which recently underwent a £12 million improvement programme, was voted best new UK tourism project by members in last year's Tourism Awards. What I liked most about this recreated town was its lack, for want of a better word, of Disneyfication. It has few costumed characters, to be sure, but save for the local policeman they are information providers rather than role players. At its edge are massive ruined blast furnaces. There is a baker whose sells bread based to a Victorian recipe and a fish and chip shop whose chips are fried – never mind the cholesterol – in beef dripping. There are Tamworth and Gloucester Old Spot pigs and a pub imported from Birmingham. You can imagine the iron rolling mill, which is sometimes fired up for demonstrations and may be the only working example left, echoing to the shouts of workers struggling to be heard above its road and clatter. The streets were covered by a thin film of mud after the previous day's rain. A couple of us took turns at the coconut shy in the little fairground, and Neil Taylor had some door wedges made in the carpentry shop.

Huge thanks for the organisation of this event go to Pat Edgar, Ironbridge's public relations consultant, who ensured that barely a minute of our day and half there was wasted.

We spent the night at Telford's comfortable Q Hotel, with its surprisingly large swimming pool, took a stroll across the Iron Bridge itself, the world's first, which proved its worth in 1795 (not long after it opened) when it was the only one on the Severn between Welshpool and the sea to survive flooding. And we even managed to fit in a tour of another Shropshire attraction, the RAF Museum at Cosford whose fine collection of aircraft includes a TSR2, the supersonic strike and reconnaissance jet cancelled amid bitter political argument in 1965.

Made a household insurance claim lately? Wouldn't you love to submit the reason given by general manager Alex Medhurst when one of the museum's Cold War exhibits was backed inadvertently into a cafe and staircase? Damage by German tank.

We should think of Ironbridge, said our guide Paul Gossage, its marketing and PR director, as the Silicon Valley of its day. At the Museum of Iron he had introduced us to Abraham Darby, who first used coke instead of charcoal in iron production which generated greater heat and was much more efficient, of whom there are no portraits, as Quakers of that era regarded them as vanity.

No such problem with our portraits, taken by a photographer for the Shropshire Star by the Boy and Swan Fountain, which was cast for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and later on the Iron Bridge by Richard Biford, former tourism officer for the region.

But the most impressive portrait of our group is in oils. Rob Pointon, who has works in many private collections including that of the Prince of Wales, painted us in the dining room of Weston Park, stately home of the Earls of Bradford, an early example of the classical style which was gifted to the nation in 1986. After a tour of the house led by curator Gareth Evans, who dazzled us with his compendious knowledge of its treasures and former occupants, we dined at a mahogany table where world leaders at the G8 summit – among them President Clinton – had sat in 1998. Rob worked at our likenesses as we dined. On the walls was a stunning array of Van Dycks, overhead a glittering, nineteenth century chandelier of crystal and ormolu. “Sometimes”, sighed Melissa, as we reflected that this was not your average backdrop for dinner on the road, “I love this job”.