Portrayals of bears, most of them not quite life sized. The gaudily coloured street decorations are from Berlin. The paler carved bears are arranged all round the courtyard of Lord Leycester’s Hospital in Warwick. The darker and actually life-sized one climbing a pole supplements the inn sign of the Bear in Berkswell. A young bear and its owner form the centrepiece of one of the misericords of the Priory church at Great Malvern.
Individual weathervanes can sometimes be stunning examples of blacksmith’s art. These have a theme of transport (one is a huntsman and hound – I don’t remember ever seeing a vane showing a horse just being used to get from A to B).
That vane was just outside Penkridge. The motorbike was on a garage on the outskirts of Stafford. The galleon by the river mouth in Teignmouth. The other boats – are they Thames barges or coasters – where the river Blyth meets the see at Southwold. The loco is on the Great Western in Wolverhampton (the pub also has some nice railway memorabilia around the bars).
In France, the fashion in doorknockers seems to run less to lions than to hands. Actually, this set includes ones seen in Ludlow, Bishops Castle, and one in Shottery before and after the door it was on had a fresh coat of paint.
Not a doorknocker, but definitely French, this was one of the lampstands in the restaurant of the Hotel CroMagnon in les Eyzies. The village is at the centre of a region with numerous prehistoric sites, with a regional gastronomy centring on le canard.
Lions are a popular subject for portrayal on door knockers. Are they meant to deter unwelcome visitors? Most of the ones in these sets are from domestic front doors which have caught my attention over the years. Can you spot one from a door of the cathedral in Mainz?
A few lion images which are not doorknockers have crept in. From inns (though none happen to be from pub signs), from an alms house building in Ludlow, and a long-defunct drinking water fountain in the same town.
A robin posing on a tree, on a Christmas Day some years ago. It didn’t want to move so a holly bush could be in the background.
Merry Christmas. Here’s some seasonal street decorations from a couple of European capital cities.
If the famous mannekin pis fountain wasn’t kitsch enough already, it gets dressed in a regularly changing array of costumes. I don’t know whether the little santa suit is an annual tradition or not.
There’s a shop entirely devoted to Lego among the up-market establishments on Berlin’s Potzdammer Platz (I assume it’s still there). They have big Lego models outside the shop. A life-sized Santa was there some years back.
Across the city, the Ku’Damm is another up-market shopping district. I’m not sure whether the larger than life figure here by one of the stalls of a Christmas market was meant to be Santa (beard, red trousers and boots) or one of the three kings (the crown).