Month: September 2015

Story of the week: A balti break in Birmingham

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* Image from meetup.com

The word means ‘bucket’ and reflects the style of cooking.

It’s one of Birmingham’s proudest inventions and, recently, the inspiration for new culinary tours that celebrate the city’s best-loved dish.

It is the Balti and, in time for British Food Fortnight, I’m in Birmingham on a blustery day to see the city through the prism of its Balti heritage.

For the first leg of my Balti Break, I join Tabriz ‘Tabs’ Hussain of the Asian Balti Association for a tour of Birmingham’s so-called Balti Triangle, more precisely three streets in the city’s Sparkbrook district, home to around 40 Balti restaurants and communities of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Yemeni families.

“The Balti was invented here around 1980, adapting a Pakistani recipe for the Western palette,” explains Tabs, as we head down Ladypool Road, stopping to admire exotic fruit and vegetables for sale outside the Raja Brothers store.

“It has helped bring prosperity to a previously deprived area.”

“Tourists never came here until a few years ago,” he adds. “Now the restaurants are packed with visitors to Birmingham,” he explains, highlighting some of the unfamiliar vegetables used in traditional Balti recipes.

Down the road at the Lahore Sweat Centre, we marvel at the vibrant rows of brightly coloured sweats, including chum chum made from semolina and milk, and coconut barfi.

The owners hands us samples and we relish the sugar hit.

The tour complete, we then stroll over to the Royal Naim restaurant on Stratford Road for the final ingredient in our Balti experience: dinner.

An informal, no-frills eatery, we sit at glass-topped tables with paintings of Kashmir adorning the walls.

As I tuck into my chicken and aubergine Balti, using the naan bread to scoop up morsels of chicken, co-diner Andy Munro, author of the Essential Street Balti Guide, explains his rationale behind the tours.

“It’s about unlocking the secrets of the area to foster cultural understanding via its cuisine,” explains Andy, who claims to have eaten over 2,000 Baltis and never once had a bad stomach.

Most of all, it’s about celebrating great flavours.

“A Balti is cooked in five minutes over a high flame and served in the same flat-bottomed wok to preserve the flavour of the spices,” grins Andy, dipping his naan hungrily.

“It’s cleaner and healthier than a typical curry – and it’s proudly Brummie.”

What did you think of this story? Post your comments below.

This story first appeared in The Weekend FT in 2008. Liked this? Try also Raising a glass to British Food Fortnight in Cumbria.

Story of the week: A surfing escape to Cornwall

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I’m a poor swimmer, have nothing by Mambo and didn’t even know the thick end (nose) of a surfboard from the thin end (tail).

I am, in short, the world’s most unlikely surf dude.

But Big Friday reckon they can turn an urbanite like me into a waxhead within a weekend.

That’s why I joined a 12-strong group, predominantly female, and ranging from a Kiwi trance DJ to a network analyst from Essex, to catch their Surf Bus for the five-hour trip down to Newquay, the home of British surfing.

Weekend escape

Big Friday offer different weekend packages from serious surfing and partying to chill-out surf chic at a secluded B&B with its own reiki massage hut overlooking Harlyn Bay, just outside of Padstow.

Our group stayed at the Boarding House, a lively but rather down-at-heel hostel-style surf lodge, located just a hop from North Fistral Beach.

Fistral has some of the best surfing in Britain and conditions from now until late October are at an optimum with sea temperatures around 16 degrees.

Sadly the vagaries of the British weather are beyond control and, at 10am on the Saturday morning, five-foot waves and on-shore wind were hardly ideal conditions for a bunch of beginners.

Nevertheless, we ventured stoically into the swell after the safety talk from our instructor, “rather surly but looks great in a wetsuit” according to one group member.

For me, just even getting into my own super-clingy bodysuit proved tricky enough, let alone riding the waves a la Hawaii Five-O. But, with practice, most people are up on their feet within the first two-hour session.

Apres surf

That night we hit the town with dinner at the stylish Chy Bar offering welcome relief from the stag-party frenzy of Newquay’s downmarket big Saturday night.

The next morning some were back out catching early waves, while I headed for a leisurely stroll along the beach and brunch at a relaxed surf café on Watergate Bay.

By the time we rolled back in London’s Victoria on Sunday night, Big Friday hadn’t made a surf dude of me, but a weekend of fresh air had banished the post-summer blues.

“It wasn’t the cheapest weekend but I liked the fact everything is arranged for you,” concluded Bronwyn, a 25-year-old PA, as we said our goodbyes.

“But I feel loads better for an escape from the city.”

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This story first appeared in The Guardian in 2004. Liked this? Try also Reviving a dying village in the Algarve.

Just back: Harbour days in Hamburg

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It was the morning after the night before.

The overnight rain has diluted the detruitus on the streets but not enough to sluice away the bodily fluids and broken dreams.

It was early morning on the Reeperbahn and the final ragtag of drunks and smackheads were tracing their zig-zag path towards home.

A few had found refuge in a final glass of beer at the Sunday morning Fish Market on the harbour front, mixing in with the tour groups and middle-class couples out shopping for fresh fish.

Both were equally wrong-footed at Jessy’s reggae coffee kart — the proprietor was sky high, or a very good actor. Either way, he insisted over a backbeat of heavy dub, that his coffee was, “Lecker, lecker, lecker” to cheers from the camera-totting crowd.

I was here for the Hamburg Cruise Days festival [pictured above], a bi-annual parade of big ships to celebrate the North German port’s historic role in the development of passenger shipping from Europe.

The night before I had watched the ships file past under fireworks, the harbour bathed in blue light as part of an art installation by the German artist, Michael Batz.

https://vimeo.com/139186091#t=0s

I had explored the urban renewal of the Hafen City district and walked the streets of the waterhouse district, where the city’s seafaring merchants housed their goods in the days when Hamburg rivalled the likes of Liverpool, Antwerp and Rotterdam as a world port city.

Athen, as night fell, I joined a walking tour of the St Pauli district to retrace the Beatles’ footsteps around the city’s former red light district.

The ukulele-playing tour guide, Stefanie Hempel, lead us through the snake pits and dive bars of the Reeperbahn, breaking into Beatles songs en route as a paean to her beloved John Lennon.

It’s like John Lennon said:

“I grew up in Liverpool but I came of age in Hamburg.”

Check out a Flickr gallery of images from my trip.

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Liked this? Try also Following the Pied Piper in Hamelin, Germany.

Story of the week: A walk around literary Manchester

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Literary types gather soon for the annual Manchester Literature Festival.

They’re in for a surprise. Manchester has a host of hidden-gem treasures and a slew of new openings for bookish types keen to explore the city’s rich literacy legacy – from Karl Marx observing working life in the mid 19th century to the UK’s current Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.

“Manchester always had an edgy, radical feel as a city,” says Blue Badge Guide Kate Dibble of Manchester Tours, who leads literary tours of the city.

“Great authors through the ages have always tried to capture it.”

Walking tour

I joined a walking tour to trace a route around the modern-industrial city, following in the footsteps of the writers who have documented its evolution.

We started by Oxford Road train station where the Cornerhouse arts centre – moving to the new HOME development in May next year – remains one of the city’s best bookshops for art and cinema literature.

The short stroll along Whitworth Street West leads us past The Ritz, the gig venue where the performance poet John Cooper Clarke famously met Salome Maloney:

“In lurex and terylene, she hypnotised me.”

The nearby International Anthony Burgess Centre, dedicated to the Manchester-born author of the dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, houses an eccentric collection of possessions, including letters to the film director Stanley Kubrick and his personal copy of A Clockwork Orange with doodles by the author.

The upstairs performance space hosts author Blake Morrison for the Burgess Lecture during the MLF on October 16, while the guided Unlocking the Archive tour is on October 22.

Heading towards St Peter’s Square, Manchester Central Library reopened in March this year after a £50m refurbishment to open up the library as a living-room space for the city.

It has welcomed some 300,000 visitors since, combining a high-tech media lounge, contemporary exhibition space and an interactive children’s library with the faithful restoration of the original architectural flourishes to their 1930s glory.

Neil MacInnes, Head of Libraries, Information and Archives, says:

“It’s the library as the street-corner university, a place to engage with knowledge and wisdom.”

Hushed reverence

By contrast, a visit to the Portico Library and Gallery, the Neo-Classical newsroom and library accessed from Charlotte Street, is like stepping back in time.

The 19th-century collection of dusty tomes, including travel literature, biographies and first-edition fiction, offers an insight into the mindset of Manchester in the industrial age. The genteel Reading Room is for members only but the café and gallery is open to all, as is the programme of literary events.

Cutting through the sidestreets towards Deansgate, the John Rylands Library, named after the 19th-century cotton magnate, is the third largest academic library in the UK.

Transformed by fusing a modern wing onto the existing neo-Gothic structure, new exhibition space and a study centre now complement the hushed reverence of the historic reading room. The John Rylands has a tour of the building and its collection on the third Thursday of each month.

Chetham’s Library, the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, traces Manchester’s literary legacy back to the medieval period.

The 17th-century Manchester textile merchant Humphrey Chetham established the library in his 1651 will as a free library for the use of scholars and the rambling space of cloisters and courtyards has been a haven for study ever since.

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx researched here and their desk is now a place of pilgrimage in the 16th-century, wood-paneled reading room.

Writing in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels describes industrial Manchester:

”If anyone wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither.“

Literary legend

I finish my tour in the city’s Ardwick district where Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, the family home of the Cranford author, reopens on October 5 after three years, restoring the Grade II-listed Regency villa as if the family had just popped out and left the table set for dinner.

The opening is timed to host two MLF events, the Manchester Salon exploring Gaskell’s 1855 novel North and South on October 8 and a walking tour of Gaskell’s Manchester, culminating at the house, on October 15.

Gaskell documented Manchester’s burgeoning industrial revolution from her writing desk at 84 Plymouth Grove after the family moved to the house in 1850 and her views contrasted starkly with the ideals of the Victorian era.

“As a female voice, few were as courageous as hers,” says Janet Allan, Chair of the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust [pictured above].

“Her greatest skill was to use storytelling to address the social issues of the era.”

A walking tour of Manchester proves the city may have evolved but its penchant for speaking out remains a constant source of literary inspiration.

What did you think of this story? Post your comments below.

This story first appeared in The Guardian in 2014. Liked this? Try also A weekend in Manchester’s Chinatown.