Bognor four

Our penultimate full day at Bognor was actually spent at Littlehampton, on the other side of the Arun. Another town which turns out to have a fine esplanade, with a fine new concrete corner dividing it into two sections, one running north along the eastern bank of the Arun, back into the old town, the other running east along the beach. I did not think to take a picture at the time, but the aerial photograph which follows gives the idea, with the pale triangle roughly in the middle being the fine new concrete corner. The wild and woolly beach that we visited on a previous occasion visible bottom left, underneath the golf course. See the end of the post at reference 1.

Lots of people about, this being a fine but not particularly hot Sunday. One of the stall holders told us that the place was often packed out on hot days.

We started out by heading east along the esplanade, with first stop at a piece of public art which doubled as seat and climbing frame. Just a bit of fun, not making a point or a statement about anything and body parts nowhere to be seen. Most refreshing. The shoes are my own, as regular readers will know, Merrells from Cotswolds. 

Second stop at what looked a marine version of a cabbage, but I don't suppose that they are actually related.

By which time it was getting on for lunch time, so we headed back to the corner and hung a right up the Arun. 

Even more gulls were sitting on the roof when we first approached this stall, which turned out to be a wet fish merchant rather than a chipper. But we pushed on and found a large chipper with indoor, outdoor and takeaway departments, from which we got some fine fish and chips. The indoor department also included a fine brown wood model of H.M.S. Victory, about six feet long and made in Mauritius from plans sent there for the purpose.

Lunch done, we pushed on into town, past the other boat, noticed at reference 2, where there was, as one would expect of a town which built ships for Henry VIII, plenty of older housing, some of it in Surrey Street. Was there any connection with the Earl of Surrey who was unluckily beheaded at the very end of the reign of Henry VIII on a charge of treasonably quartering the royal arms. The Earl was, it seems a rather vain scion of the Howard family, now headquartered up the road at Arundel, a scion who carried his vanity a bit too far on this last occasion.

Also a lot of new building, so we wondered whether the town had been bashed around during the second war. But what accounted for the long standing gap below? Surely a development opportunity for someone?

Once in town we ran down a Sainsbury's where I was able to buy bread and kabanosi against the projected evening picnic. Can't manage two full-on meals in one day any more. Kabanosi turned out to be not bad, not great, but not involving either chicken or cheese which was good.

All in all, not a bad place at all, reminding us somewhat of Topsham, some way further down the coast, on the Exe rather than the Arun. If Bognor comes unstuck for any reason, maybe we will wind up here instead.

PS: I find that google maps provides much higher resolution and generally better quality aerial photographs than bing maps, at least of this bit of Littlehampton. So the aerial photograph above comes from google. On the other hand, Windows 10 has the nice feature of automatically saving screen shots to OneDrive without having to mess about with pasting them into something like Paint and saving them by hand.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/arun-1.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/companion-piece.html.