Peckham Rye station & Sarah Sze video art

I rarely go to Peckham, which is a suburb of southeast London. I have never used Peckham Rye train station and have never seen the station entrance as it is hidden by shops. 

When I read that the old Victorian station waiting room was open to the public for a free art exhibition, I went to have a look.

The station opened in 1865. It was an important junction station with one line going to Crystal Palace near Sydenham Hill, which had become popular after the Great Exhibition in 1851. The station was designed by architect Charles Driver, who also helped with the design of the pumping stations at Abbey Mills and Crossness. 

From May till September 2023, there is a Sarah Sze art exhibition in the waiting room above the station. The newly restored heritage staircase up to the waiting room has impressive rails -

In 1922 the waiting room was changed to a billiards hall. This was closed by British Rail in 1962 and the room has been closed to the public since and is still in its original state.

The Sarah Sze video artwork consists of a large central globe in a matrix of thin stainless-steel tubing. A large number of pieces of paper give the globe shape and these are illuminated by moving images from 42 video projectors. It gives a magic lantern effect. The artwork is named Metronome.

Images are also projected onto the walls, this one showed birds flying round the room - 

Projecting onto the walls gave people a chance to see the impressive unrestored waiting room -

See more on the exhibition, Sarah Sze, the Waiting Room.

Going back to the station, it was given listed status in 2008 and over the last 10 years parts of the closed station have been restored and there was a major restoration of the roof and facade by Network Rail in 2023. The front of the newly renovated station was only revealed in April. And there are plans to remove the shopping corridor in front of the station. 

See more on IanVisits, which gives a lot of detail and photos on the work being done on the station. Also on an earlier IanVisits page, a nice photo of the waiting room roof.

Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London

The Hunterian Museum opened to the public on 16 May 2023, with free entry. It is a medical museum, housed in the ground floor of the Royal College of Surgeons, at Lincolns Inn Fields, London. Directly across the park is Sir John Soane's Museum.

The Hunterian Museum is named after the 18th century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-1793).  It displays over 2,000 anatomical preparations from Hunter’s original collection, alongside instruments, equipment, models, paintings and archive material, which trace the history of surgery from ancient times to the latest robot-assisted operations. The Museum includes England’s largest public display of human anatomy.

It was larger than I expected and covers several rooms. Being new, everything is laid out really well with easy to see labels and good lighting. The display A Curious Mind shows lots of animal bones and skeletons and preserved bodies.

Student surgeons in Hunter's day needed lots of corpses to practice their anatomy skills -

I liked the large touch screen displays

Cross section of an elephant trunk on 2nd shelf down, with lizards on shelf below -

The Long Gallery is the biggest room and contains very many human specimens, including fetuses. Photography is not allowed here, though most people were ignoring this rule!

The last few rooms progress up to the current times with modern surgery and how it transforms lives.

The museum is well worth a visit, although there is an awful lot to take in. 

See all the details on the Hunterian Museum official site. Also an article on Time Out.

London Wetlands Centre

I've had the London Wetlands Centre on my to do list for a long time, but have never been, simply because the entry fee of £17 seems expensive. I have visited various other wetlands in east London for free. See Walthamstow Marshes & Lea River, also Walthamstow Wetlands.

When I read that tickets for the London Wetlands Centre would be on sale for 20 May 2023 to celebrate their 23rd anniversary, I put the date in my diary. Tickets were being sold at the original price of £6.50. 

The centre is in southwest London, accessible from Barnes railway station. 

The area occupies several Victorian reservoirs and has been turned into a wildlife reserve, adjacent to the River Thames. Google Earth image -

There are paths around the wetlands and there are a couple of hides. When I arrived I realised the otters were being fed so I hurried there, but was too late to get a good view. A heron was waiting to grab any food left by the otters -

I walked round the ponds closer to the centre, and saw several types of ducks.

Common goldeneye from Scandinavia, Russia and northwest Europe and Asia -

Smew ducks from the same area. The males are the white ones and have a punk style crest -

A pair of Wood ducks, from North America. The male is very colourful -

The common moorhen, also known as the waterhen or swamp chicken is widespread in England -

I left the ponds and headed out past the reed beds towards the reservoirs. I went into one of the hides, where bird books were available for reference.

Then back into the enclosed areas with the smaller ponds. Egyptian goose -

The white-faced whistling duck, they breed in sub-Saharan Africa and much of South America -

A male mallard having a rest

On the way out, I went to see if the otters were around, but they were hiding after their meal.

The London Wetlands Centre page. The centre comes under the charity WWT, Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Limited.

Iquique & Atacama Desert saltpetre ghost towns, Chile

In northern Chile there are many ghost towns that were abandoned long ago. They are slowly falling into ruin due to the harsh Atacama desert. These towns were built around a mining industry that produced saltpetre (sodium nitrate), this was used in fertilizer production from the late 1800s.

Chile is a desert plateau on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes Mountains, in the rain shadow of Andes. The Atacama desert stretches approximately 1600 km in northern Chile from the border of Peru. It is the driest nonpolar desert in the world, and the second driest overall. Meltwater from the desert creates green ribbons. Water is used for irrigation for farming. Wikipedia map -

Dozens of mining towns were built in the desert for the saltpetre mining. Chile saltpetre is sodium nitrate, an alkali metal nitrate salt. It gets the name Chile saltpetre as large deposits were historically mined in Chile. Ordinary saltpetre is potassium nitrate. 

During the heyday of mining, most of the world's saltpetre came from the Atacama Desert. It was known as white gold. Much of it went to Europe for use a fertiliser for food crops. It was a very important revenue for Chile. 

James Thomas Humberstone, also known by his Spanish name, Santiago Humberstone, was an English chemical engineer who arrived in South America in 1875 to work in the nitrate offices of Tarapacá, Northern Chile. The nitrate industry was quite intense until two German scientists synthesized ammonia during the late 1920s. This meant fertilizers could be produced more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost. Within 30 years, most of the towns and saltpetre works had virtually been abandoned.

Iquique and the mining town of Humberstone were originally in Peruvian territory when Humberstone arrived. Other saltpetre towns belonged to Bolivia. However many of the companies that operated in the area were Chilean backed by British investment and there was a large Chilean population. But then in 1878 Bolivia increased the taxes that an Anglo-Chilean company paid on its nitrate exports. This led to the War of the Pacific, 1879-1883. After four years the Chileans finally won and annexed a large area of nitrate rich Bolivian and Peruvian territory. This included the Peruvian province of Tarapaca.

The industry lasted until the first World War. In the war, the British stopped exports of saltpetre to Germany. This led to the German scientists finding a synthetic replacement to make fertilizer. That was the end of the Chilean nitrate industry. 

James Humberstone died in 1939 in Iquique. Iquique is a coastal town that was built up from the nitrate mining and was known as the world’s nitrate capital as it was exported all over the world. The town has a mild desert climate and very little rainfall. Water comes from deep wells and is piped down from tanks in the desert.

The town is long and narrow and the desert hills come right down to the town. The historic centre has brightly coloured Georgian houses built between 1880 and 1920. Astoreca Palace is an imposing mansion from 1904. Plaza Prat has exotic palm trees that Iquiquenos brought to  decorate the city. There is a clock tower from 1877.

There are a surprising number of high rise condos, especially considering the area has bad earthquakes. There was a 7.8 in 2005 that destroyed a lot of the town and a 2014 8.1 quake that destroyed the road out of town.

Outside Iquique there is a monument to the nitrate workers at a roundabout. 

The road starts climbing up to the desert, passing the 2.5 km long ridged sand dune known as Cerro Dragon, Dragon sanctuary. The sand was used to make porcelain, but the dune is now protected. 

Once up in the desert, the road passes a couple of old silver mines with pink coloured hills, they finished before the nitrate mining started. There was a train serving  the nitrate mines, started 1871(?). Lots of shrines along the road and there is also a wire fence the whole length, to mark concessions. It is now a toll road.

46 km from Iquique is the old mining town of Santa Laura. Today you can walk around the old nitrate workings – processing plant, smokestacks, administration building and warehouse. 1000 workers were here and there were 7 water wells.

This shows the process of leaching -

Caliche is a mineral deposit of gravel, sand, and nitrates, found in dry areas of America. The caliche is leached with water and then the solution was crystallized by cooling or evaporation.

Leaching plant -

The tall chimney spewed out white vaporous steam from the boilers.

The offices and store etc -

Poster advertising Chile fertiliser in Chinese

From Santa Laura, we drove over to the much larger Humberstone. This started 1872, then closed, and reopened 1934. With modernisation it became the most successful of the saltpetre  works in 1940. It was abandoned in 1960.

It was originally known as La Palma and about 3500 people lived there in its heyday. It must have been a terrible job working there in the heat of the desert. Gangs of men dug out the caliche which was ground down in crushers, then dissolved in large boilers and the nitrate of soda extracted from the tanks.

The tourist area is mostly the old town buildings such as the general store, chapel, theatre with seats still in place, hotel and full sized swimming pool. Entry is about £7.50. 

Old locomotives which were made in England -

The chapel and swimming pool -

The stores -

The old workings are off limits to tourists -

In 2005 Humberstone and Santa Laura were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. There is a lot more detailed information on the UNESCO page.