srw
It's a bit more complicated than that...
As well as owls, millionaires' mansions and the delights of the Phoenix trail you also passed three important sites in the history of Britain in the second half of the 20th century.
The first was the former British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, where the Chorleywood bread process was invented. I've never been able to pinpoint exactly where it was, but I gather it was near the Chorleywood church, about a mile after the M25. It may have saved a nation from hunger, but it did so by destroying any hope of good quality local bakers producing decent bread. If you've ever wondered why Belgium, France and Germany all have a bakery in every village while we pop out to Tesco's for a loaf of white sliced - blame Chorleywood.
The second is now branded as GE Healthcare. It's a few offices and a campus between Chalfont and Latimer station and Amersham. As a metaphor for UK industrial policy over the last 50-odd years you couldn't get much better - a nationalised company that was a world leader in the development of the applications of nuclear science to medicine, the victim of the first privatisation of the Thatcher government, which wound up as a small outpost of a US conglomerate.
The third, of course, is the old British Leyland plant in Cowley. A symbol of union domination in the 1970s, producing such high quality vehicles as the Morris Marina and the Austin Maestro (they were sold cheaply to workers, so were very common on the streets of Abingdon and Oxford when I was young), the plant eventually became part of BMW. These days they make a large hatchback there, absurdly branded as a Mini. And they're planning to close the plant for a month next April because the government can't guarantee their supply lines will be available.
The first was the former British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, where the Chorleywood bread process was invented. I've never been able to pinpoint exactly where it was, but I gather it was near the Chorleywood church, about a mile after the M25. It may have saved a nation from hunger, but it did so by destroying any hope of good quality local bakers producing decent bread. If you've ever wondered why Belgium, France and Germany all have a bakery in every village while we pop out to Tesco's for a loaf of white sliced - blame Chorleywood.
The second is now branded as GE Healthcare. It's a few offices and a campus between Chalfont and Latimer station and Amersham. As a metaphor for UK industrial policy over the last 50-odd years you couldn't get much better - a nationalised company that was a world leader in the development of the applications of nuclear science to medicine, the victim of the first privatisation of the Thatcher government, which wound up as a small outpost of a US conglomerate.
The third, of course, is the old British Leyland plant in Cowley. A symbol of union domination in the 1970s, producing such high quality vehicles as the Morris Marina and the Austin Maestro (they were sold cheaply to workers, so were very common on the streets of Abingdon and Oxford when I was young), the plant eventually became part of BMW. These days they make a large hatchback there, absurdly branded as a Mini. And they're planning to close the plant for a month next April because the government can't guarantee their supply lines will be available.
. Back down to the NT, and a good crowd had gathered. Following the usual formalities and informalities, there was a slight delay to the usual departure time, not because of one of those traditional punctures, but because Nick's Garmin was taking its own sweet time in loading the route file up.
