Denham Grove

Last week we had an excuse to pay another visit to the Denham Grove Hotel, which I now know to be owned by Neal Khanna, a chap who had previously built up the high-end catering operation at Clay Oven of reference 4. Which explains why the Indian food in this hotel, which seems, during the week, to mostly cater to people working on the nearby HS2, is so good. Their naan, for example, are very good, if not quite as flashily presented as those snapped from reference 4 above. A hotel which is set in extensive grounds, once the gardens of a now vanished country house. At some point it was a BP training centre. Various very fancy houses round about - and the odd Wellingtonia, previously noticed. For which see references 2 and 3. A hotel we have visited a few times now.

Maybe Mr. Khanna uses the place to work his catering staff up to the standard of his other restaurants.

Set above the Colne Valley, with the art prize winning Colne Valley viaduct running just to the east. An impressive bit of concrete - for which the cost justification is nothing like as impressive. Somewhere just beyond the trees outside our bedroom window.

Concerning which, reference 5 reminded me of a piece written years ago by Simon Jenkins about how the UK public sector seemed to be a sitting duck for very large and glossy projects - without troubling anything like as much as it should about value for money and cost justification  As I recall, untrained civil servants are all to easily swept up in the publicity bandwagons pulled along by the huge budgets for projects of this sort. They make good bets for the private sector.

Maybe we have too many highly trained civil engineers without enough to do. Which gives them plenty of time to cook up prize winning vanity projects - aka white elephants. From where I associate to Centre Point at TottenhamCourt Road - a handsome building, but one with a very chequered history. Then going still further back, there was something called Blue Streak. And just a year or so ago a second world beating aircraft carrier for which we could no longer afford the aircraft.

[a view of the Colne Valley Viaduct. According to Copilot: 'The Colne Valley Viaduct has been awarded the prestigious Engineering Award at the 2024 Royal Fine Art Commission Trust Building Beauty Awards. This award was presented by HRH the Duke of Gloucester, recognizing the viaduct as a "tour de force" that balances its large scale with a light and graceful presence across the Colne Valley...']

And while I dare say HS2 has fed huge amounts of money into various useful parts of the national fabric, not least the public archaeology and save the bats industries, maybe we could have had something more useful to show for it all? A few new hospitals? Or some big tanks to help the Ukrainians?

Back at Denham Grove, I took my first pint of beer, a fizzy beer called Malabar, for a month or so, together with a couple of very handsome samosas. The pomegranate seeds worked really well, adding colour, texture and flavour to the basic sauce.

Followed by something Tandoori, with a couple of their fine naans. Hot meat sandwiches! BH made a more conservative choice. But it was all very good, well presented and nicely served. Furthermore, the barmaid remembered us from our previous visit - which surprised me - the place was busy enough for most faces to be forgotten.

Being out in the country meant that there was some serious frost on the car in the morning.

Reminding me of the curious, context dependent shapes that ice crystals can take. The ice up the inside of the windows of butchers' shops was, for example, quite different from that of the windows of florists. In the 1930s, the Russians thought that the curious shapes you get from very slightly impure chemicals might tell us something about the origin of life. A matter in which I took a rather childish interest in the early 1960s, fuelled by free access to my father's fine microscope. I don't think I would have been as relaxed about such a thing thirty years later!

Home by the country route, that is to say avoiding the M25, passing a little to the east of both Northolt and Heathrow. Which includes some impressively low flying jets - impressive that is when one does not live there. Which takes perhaps an hour and a half instead of an hour, but, at our age, much less demanding. Particularly when one has the combined services of Ordnance Survey, mobile phone and gmaps helping with the navigation. I found gmaps - with its little blue flag saying where you were - particularly helpful at all the large junctions that had to be crossed.

I was quite startled by how accurately it could compute one's position. Perhaps there is particularly good telephone tower coverage in and around Heathrow.

PS: is the proposed runway for Heathrow another white elephant, along the lines of aforementioned HS2? It might not involve public money, but it will still soak up a lot of resources which might have been deployed elsewhere.

References

Reference 1: https://denhamgrove.com/.

Reference 2: https://bucksgardenstrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Denham_Grove.pdf.

Reference 3: https://www.thecaterer.com/news/denham-grove-hotel-sold-to-owner-of-the-clay-oven.

Reference 4: https://theclayoven.co.uk/.

Reference 5: How the UK ended up building the world’s most expensive railway: HS2 is set to cost more per kilometre than any other rail project in the world as total bill could surpass £100bn - Gill Plimmer, Jim Pickard, Jonathan Vincent, Financial Times - 2026.