Bedford; Sunday, 08 October, 2023

Another relatively late lie in and breakfast before checking out of the hotel and heading over to the nearby bus stop to pick up the bus down to the small village of Silsoe and the Country Estate of Wrest Park. The park was in the de Grey family for 600 years up until 1917 when the family was forced to sell, with the buildings and elaborate gardens passing into the ownership of an insurance company who turned the house into offices.

At the turn of the millennium the site was passed over to English Heritage who, nearly 20 years after they were gifted the building, are still carrying out restoration works of the house with only some ground floor rooms open to the public, but the stunning gardens have been fully restored and can be explored in full. I spent a good couple of hours wandering around the site before it was time to hop back on a bus and head back into Bedford.

I had a quick lunch before heading over to the towns main museum, The Higgins. The museum is named for the family that owned the house and attached Brewery that the bulk of the museum is built around. I spent a good hour or so wandering around the different galleries.

Just across the road from The Higgins is the Panacea Museum. The museum is located in the houses that the Panacea society purchased at the start of the 20th century as a group that were convinced that the second coming of Christ was imminent and that they should prepare for the after life. Over a number of years they purchased several houses and merged the gardens into a single space, building a chapel in the centre of the complex.

The group has long since closed, but the trust they founded is still around and tells their story in the museum which allows you explore most of the buildings on the site and the gardens as well.

Having taken in the Panacea I headed back over to the hotel to pick up my bag and walk back to Bedford station to start the needlessly lengthy journey home. If this was a normal day I would have been able to get a train direct from Bedford to East Croydon taking less than 90 minutes to make the journey and would have been home within 2 hours. Instead due to engineering works I had to catch the dreaded rail replacement bus all the way over to Hitchin on the East Coast mainline, which took an hour, and wait there for another 30 minutes for the train down to East Croydon. There was an option to risk it and catch a bus 30 minutes later as that was supposed to connect, but that was only just pulling into the station forecourt as my train pulled away from Hitchin.

I eventually made it to East Croydon more than an hour later than I would have done on a normal weekend.