I’ve been working on a copywriting project over the autumn.
The brief came from Conwy County Borough Council to write the Visit Llandudno tourism brochure for 2016.
I’ve tried to bring the brochure, out early in the new year, a more news-driven feel as well as weaving in some more personal narratives, including taking my daughters on a family weekend in Llandudno.
But I’ve also tried to highlight some of the grew stories around the region, coming up with the idea of a local voices panel for some the spreads.
By way of an example, here’s a preview of one of these from Gwynne Thomas, owner of the Conwy Brewery:
“I love beer. I love the taste, the variety and, currently, the innovation going on in beer and brewing.
“I remember my first pint of real ale as a teenager with my dad but started brewing with home-brew kits as a chemistry student at Newcastle University.
“I started the microbrewery in Conwy in 2004 and expanded in 2007, viewing it as a less of a cottage industry and more of a commercial enterprise as a my client base grew.
“Today we produce some 25,000 pints per week with five core ales, four American-style craft beers and regular guest ales.
“We also now run brewery tours and design your own beer days at our brewery in the village of Llysfaen, Colwyn.
“My role has changed a lot. I got involved with The Albion real-ale pub in Cowny in 2012 and we opened The Bridge Inn last year.
“Cowny Brewery ales are now in around 100 pubs across North Wales, plus a national listing with JD Wetherspoon, and we recently signed a deal to sell into Co-operative convenience stores.
“But one my key tasks remains tasting the beers to check they’re up t scratch.
That’s the hardest part of the job, obviously.”
Check back here, or at my Twitter page (above), for details of when the brochure will be available in TICs around Wales.
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The crowds will gather on May 7 on Liverpool’s waterfront.
They will congregate around a rusty old ship’s propeller on the quayside outside the Merseyside Maritime Museum and bow their heads in silent contemplation in what has become an annual commemoration for families connected to one of Britain’s most tragic maritime disasters.
HMS Lusitania made her maiden trans-Atlantic voyage out of Liverpool in 1907 and became a casualty of WWI in May 1915, when she was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine.
Some 1,192 people, many innocent women and children, perished in the Lusitania disaster and the sinking became a turning point in the First World War.
To mark the centenary, the Merseyside Maritime Museum opened its new permanent Lusitania exhibition, a new space devoted to the ill-fated Cunard liner, in March this year.
The exhibition tells the story of the disaster through the eyes of the people of Liverpool. It’s the latest chapter of a story that started in 1982 when the ship’s propeller was returned to its Liverpool home.
“I want the items in the gallery to speak for themselves,” says Eleanor Moffat, the Museum’s Curator of Maritime Collections.
“These personal items are not necessarily worth much money but, when you learn the stories behind them, they connect us first hand to our maritime heritage.”
Prodigal return
The cruise liner company Cunard was founded in Liverpool in 1839 and its head office remained in the city until 1967.
Today the Cunard Building, where the company relocated its headquarters in 1916, is one of the World-Heritage-listed Three Graces on the Pier Head (along with The Royal Liver Building and the Port of Liverpool Building).
There are plans to open up the building this summer to visitors, running tours of the interior with its Italian marble columns and arches, fifth floor Boardroom and ground floor pillared ticket hall, plus the lounge for First Class passengers.
Cunard rapidly expanded its business to not just shipping across the Atlantic to the Unites States and Canada, but also routes to ports in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
By 1877 the company had 46 vessels: 19 on the Atlantic run, 12 in the Mediterranean and Black Sea services, and a further 13 serving Glasgow, Northern Ireland and Bermuda.
Cunard ships will return to Liverpool this summer to mark a historic anniversary.
The three largest Cunard ships ever built, the Queen Mary 2, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria will sail back into the city from May 24 to 26 to celebrate 175 years of the inauguration of Cunard’s transatlantic service from Liverpool in July 1840.
The Queen Mary 2 then sails on July 4 from Liverpool to New York, emulating the journey of Britannia some 175 years earlier to the day.
This will be the first time a Cunard ship has departed from Liverpool for America since January 1968. The departure will be preceded that day by a special commemorative concert at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral while projections onto waterfront buildings over three nights will recount the story of Liverpool at sea.
“Liverpool still feels a very strong link as Cunard’s spiritual home,” adds Eleanor Moffat.
“Liverpool’s wealth stems from the golden era of the shipping lines in the 18th and 19th centuries. This period established the city as a centre for world trade and commerce.”
Visitor attractions
The return of the Cunard vessels is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of spectators to the city and showcase the ongoing urban regeneration of Liverpool’s historic waterfront.
Unesco granted six areas of Liverpool, including a couple along the waterfront, World Heritage status as a maritime mercantile city in 2004 and projects continue to this day, the latest of which is to expend the new Liverpool Cruise Terminal to accommodate ships with up to 3,500 passengers.
Visitors to the city for the Cunard anniversary will find, handily, that all the main maritime sights are contained within a one-mile sweep alongside the River Mersey.
This runs from the Cruise Terminal (Princes Dock) to the Echo Arena (Kings Dock) via the Albert Dock museum quarter and the Pier Head, home to the Three Graces.
Heading left from the Cruise Terminal, past the Titanic Memorial, the first major attraction is the Museum of Liverpool.
Opened in 2011, the angular, glass-fronted building tells the story of the city and its people. The Great Port gallery explores the development of the docks and the tidal River Mersey while the Global City gallery examines Liverpool’s pivotal role in the expansion of the British Empire.
The waterside walkway leads towards to the Albert Dock, where Tate Liverpool has been bringing world-class exhibitions, including the Turner Prize, to the Liverpool waterfront since the regeneration of the docklands in the late 1980s.
The gallery hosts the major exhibition of works by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington during May. While you’re browsing the minimalist gallery space, stop by the floor-to-ceiling windows to catch glimpses of the cityscape at different angles along the waterfront.
Located just across from Tate Liverpool is the Merseyside Maritime Museum, incorporating the International Slavery Museum on its upper floors.
The latter explores Liverpool’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, opening the visit with powerful quotes, such as Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 speech, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free.”
Archive material
For a deeper understanding of Liverpool’s deep-rooted relationship with Liverpool, and an opportunity to browse rare items of maritime heritage, however, take a short stroll across the city centre to the University of Liverpool Library.
It’s here, amid the hushed reverence of a reading room in the department of Special Collections and Archives that members of the public can access the Cunard archive – by prior appointment.
Liverpool University acquired the Cunard Steamship Company Archive in the 1960’s and it has remained there on long-term deposit ever since.
It comprises over 400 linear metres of material and covers primarily the period from 1840 to 1990. The collection is arranged into 13 sections, such as Chairmen’s Papers, Accounts Department and Public Relations records.
The archive is a treasure trove of material, including daily bulletin on-board newsletters and menu cards.
A January 1842 passenger list from the Britannia shows a certain Charles Dickens, his wife and her servant sailing from Liverpool to Boston – Dickens paid 40 pounds and 19 shillings for a cabin room. A collection of black-and-white photos from May 1928 of life on board HMS Aquitania, meanwhile, looks like scenes straight out of the popular TV series Downton Abbey.
Cunard archivist Sian Wilks is busily collating a digital database of items from the archive for the company’s 175th anniversary.
Taking the Cunard archive online aims to widen access to both the local community and the increasing number of international enquiries, including those from Canada and United States for ancestry research.
She is also sourcing items to feature in an exhibition of Cunard cruise posters at the University of Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery and Museum in October this year. She says:
“There’s a lot of excitement about Cunard using Liverpool as a port again. It reflects the pride the city feels about the regeneration of its historic waterfront.”
Sian handled some 600 item retrievals for visitors last year and regularly assists members of the public searching for family ancestry links through the archive material.
“It’s rare for someone to find a family member through the archive but, when it does happen, it’s a great feeling,” she smiles.
The bunting will be out for the anniversary events this summer and fireworks will accompany the historic sailings. While the mood may be more sombre for the Lusitania commemoration, a sense of celebration and revelling in maritime heritage will be blowing in off the River Mersey this month.
Cunard is coming home.
What did you think of this story? Post your comments below.
This article was due to be first published in Discover Britain magazine earlier this year.
Learn French, expect to spend more than you would on mainland France and bring your international driving licence.
Travellers seeking more than just a week lying by a hotel pool or lazing in a rustic gite often find that escaping the crowds requires running the gauntlet of the most dramatic — and often unkempt — switchback roads in Europe.
Indeed, with its dramatic topography of hairpin bends, sheer drops and white-knuckle intersections, Corsica often draws more comparisons to Tibet than to its nearest French neighbour, Nice.
Opening up
With Corsica now slowly opening up to international tourism, the former two maxims still ring true.
In recent years, however, the latter is less pertinent. For as the number of tourists from outside the traditional markets of Italy and France continues to steadily rise, moves are under way to finally update Corsica’s notoriously ramshackle train system.
As such, tourists to the renegade Mediterranean island are discovering a whole new way to explore the island’s rural heartland: Corsica par le train.
Le Micheline, the island’s uniquely lo-fi bone-shaker, cuts a 157km swathe through the Corsican countryside with connections from the northern ferry hub, Bastia, to the capital, Ajaccio.
En route it takes in the walker’s hub of Corte and extends, via a gloriously dinky 73km toy-train shuttle, along the northwest Balagne coastline to Calvi.
The network was built in during the halcyon days of railroad design and its feats of engineering remain impressive: 32 tunnels, 83 level crossings and 76 viaducts (one of them, the Pont de Vecchiu to the south of Venaco, a Gustave Eiffel masterpiece).
Rolling the Corsican rails, therefore, is the kind of rustic experience that appeals to more than just Euro trainspotters.
Despite the ancient rolling stock and narrow-gauge tracks, the Micheline has kept on rolling like a living, wheezing museum piece, stopping frequently for cows on the track and sometimes breaking down quite randomly.
But always doing so with a certain hard-to-hate, frozen-in-time charm.
Making tracks
There are now plans afoot, however, to breathe life into the network with new tacks, improved rolling stock and more trains per day by mid-May 2004, the start of next year’s peak season.
Its baby sister, the Tramways de Balagne, which runs between the resorts of Calvi and Ile Rousse stopping at various hidden coves and tiny beaches en route, is also due for a facelift.
It was at one of these stops, Algajola, that I found Corsica’s best-kept secret.
This charming little coastal town — all ochre facades and sun-kissed squares with an old citadel peeking out over the ocean — retains the unique sense of unspoilt tranquillity that sets Corsica apart from other more crowded destinations in the Med.
Better still, it has all the facilities you will ever need with some decent hotels, colourful little eateries and villas for hire from UK operators.
While Algajola remains untouched by mass tourism, Cap Corse is so undiscovered it still even lacks an organised public transport system beyond its visitor’s hub.
This maquis-covered peninsula, 40km long and around 10km wide, stands out from the rest of Corsica, giving a giant geographical finger to the French Riviera.
Hit the road
The first leg, running north from Bastia, is well served by good roads and regular bus services but once past Macinaggio and with the rocky ascent over the top of the peninsula ahead of you, you have to resort to the oldest form of transport known to man: hitchhiking.
Thankfully France has a well-developed hitching network and Corsica, in particular, stands at the vanguard of France’s hitching movement with a strong legacy of giving rides to stranded foreigners.
As a first-time hitcher, I soon became a convert to the dying art of hitchhiking and found it was a great way to meet fellow travellers.
My first lift was from a friendly Parisian couple who were bowled cover the scenery and new converts to the Corsican landscape.
From Barcaggio, a rather taciturn local family then took me part of the way with the father smoking heavily and the mother reminiscing about her wild days as an au pair in Putney.
After an overnight stop in Centuri, I was back on the road thanks to young Italian couple with a penchant for national parks and driving at breakneck speeds along implausibly narrow roads as only the Italians can.
After several long, hot hours stood by the roadside with a small cardboard sign, I finally rolled into Nonza with a lift from a friendly local delivering a fridge to his cousin who insisted we all stopped for a celebratory coffee before saying our goodbyes.
A charming little village standing 150m above a blackened shingle beach, Nonza is at 70 people the largest community on the less-explored western cape.
On the journey we’d passed a slew of tiny fishing harbours carved from rocky bays, historic Genoese watchtowers clinging frantically to sheer cliff faces and some of the most dramatic switchback turns in Europe.
Journeys end
As I sat in Café de la Tour, the focal point of Nonza’s village life, with a Perrier a la menthe in one hand and highly dramatic ocean backdrop behind me, I reached my final destination.
I had tamed the iron horse, thundering through the countryside and juddering in my seat with every thrash and turn of the rolling stock.
My introduction to hitching had, meanwhile, provided me with a slew of travelling companions eager to swap tales with a lone Brit in the middle of the Corsican countryside.
Next time, I vowed, I’d be brushing up on my French, stocking up on travellers cheques but definitely leaving the driving licence at home.
What did you think of this story? Post your comments below.
This article was first published in TheGuardian in 2004.
Workshop news. I ran a taster session for the Chester IVC group last night [pictured above].
It was based around writing features for magazines and hosted by the Cross Keys pub in their upstairs room, plus fuelled by one of their Sunday roasts.
We developed some great story ideas on the night from travel to health via food and careers. Thanks to those who took part for sharing their ideas and writing in a supportive environment.
One key aspect of the workshop was about crafting your first line. As I explained:
“It’s really important as you win the reader in the first line. So make it good.”
We went on to talk about styles of introductions and how these can win over the reader to hook them into your story. Examples of intro include …
Provocative / intriguing to bring colour, contrast, impact
Narrative / anecdote as an oblique way into the story
Descriptive / scene setter to take the reader right into the story in an active and colourful way
Question to make the reader think
Direct speech can look ugly but a great quote can have real impact
Some feedback on the night from the attendees includes the comments below.
“I had a fabulous time, really thought provoking and fun. Can’t wait until the next one.” — Emma
“Liked the setting and company. A great group of people.” — Alison
I’m planning more workshop for 2016 and there’s even an idea for a writing retreat in Wales. Sign up to my newsletter for more details.
