Room with a View

Apologies for the rubbish phone photo - I really must spend more time checking the camera next time I get a new phone, since they seem to be getting worse (why, for instance, do Nokia phones not allow jpeg 'superfine'?).

Anyway, back to the backblip. On Saturday night we stayed at the Stoneway Guest House while in Bridgnorth to visit my mother-in-law.

The guest house was originally the waiting room / tea-room for the cliff railway -hence the view from our bedroom window. Since the journey only takes about two minutes, one might wonder why they needed such large and well-appointed waiting rooms (now you wait in the car). It appears that the answer is because the railway was originally hydraulic and it took a long time for the tanks to fill to the required volume to generate the pressure needed to haul the car full of people up the steep incline.

I wonder how many other apparent refinements of civilization that we appear to have lost were in fact social solutions to engineering problems?