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Cockington Green Gardens Model Village, Canberra
The first British streaker being escorted from Twickenham Stadium (although this is not a replica of that stadium - just remembers the event) during a soccer match in 1979. Although there is still loads to see in the Canberra city centre, we’ll keep that for a future visit. Today we went into the suburb of Nicholls, just up the road, to Gold Creek Village which is an area with lots of entertaining things for all ages. I really wanted to see the miniature buildings at Cockington Green Gardens and we both thought we’d check out the National Dinosaur Museum. I have loved model villages since I first saw Bekonscot, the oldest one in the world – now 85 years old, near London in the UK as a child so I couldn’t wait to relive my childhood here and see how it compared.
Cockington Green is only a baby, built in 1979, and the first section was based on the village of Cockington in Torquay in Devon, UK and then came a sort of walk through the history of British building styles. This is very similar to Bekonscot, with lovely buildings set in immaculately kept gardens full of colourful flowers and tiny trees or shrubs with a train, lake, and cricket and football pitches, both with games underway.
There are wonderful little figures populating all areas and it was
Cockington Green Gardens Model Village, Canberra
Typical English village street of shops with villagers who are having a visit from the Loch Ness Monster great fun trying to find the jokes that were hidden everywhere. In one house, you could just see through a door to a man sitting on the loo reading a newspaper. A dog who had stolen some sausages was being chased by the butcher down the high street. The Loch Ness monster was just appearing in one of the rivers. The Grim Reaper was standing in the cemetery beside the church watching the grave-diggers. Freddy Krueger was facing off against Jason in a garden. A horse in the middle of the fox hunt had gone on strike and sat down, despite the rider pulling on his reins beside him (reminiscent of the photo in the pub at Genoa!). One of my favourites was the first British streaker who had run through a soccer game at Twickenham Stadium in 1979, being led off the pitch by a British bobby holding his helmet over the “naughty bits”! Brought back memories. The accompanying sign explained that the streaker had been fined ten pounds ($26) but the helmet was sold for charity in 2000, for two thousand four hundred pounds ($5,600)!
In 1997, the owners decided to go international and also create buildings
Cockington Green Gardens, Canberra
St Andrews Church, Kiev, Ukraine. This model took about 3000 hours to build. from countries that have embassies in Canberra. The Embassies and High Commissions were asked if they would like to participate and a small fee was charged to reserve a site. I would imagine they would have helped choose what building was going to represent their country (some were not what you would expect, though!). Several of them have been sponsored by individuals and companies, too. The result is two very different areas which are both wonderful.
Some of the stand-outs in the international area include Borobudur Temple, Indonesia; St Mark’s Church, Croatia – with its amazingly intricate tiled roof; the Palace of Darius, Persepolis, Iran; Masada Northern Palace, Israel; St Andrews Church, Ukraine- which looked more like a castle than a church; Chateau Bojnice, Slovakia – which belonged in a fairy tale; and the ornately painted Torogan, Philippines. There was also the Treasury Building from Petra, which we saw in real life a few years ago and a first glance was good but Barry was most disgruntled to see that a lot of the detail was missing from the facade (
It’s a model, dear, they probably couldn’t recreate all those small sculpted details. “Well it looks all wrong”). I
Cockington Green Gardens, Canberra
St Mark's Church, near Zagreb, Croatia. The model took about 2000 hours to complete and has 45,000 roof tiles that were individually laid.. was rather underwhelmed with the UK and Australian ones, though. They had picked very boring things – the Central Deborah Gold Mine in Bendigo to represent Australia and the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway for UK. Surely there were more interesting and representative places they could have used! Despite these two, we were very impressed overall and had great fun, including going on the little passenger train which ran around the edge and overlooked it all, even taking us past a spaceship parked on the roof of the toilet block that couldn’t be seen from the ground. The alien was going to the miniature toilet block (I’m definitely having a second childhood! The littlest things give me the greatest delight).
Tucked around the corner, there was one more surprise carved into the bank as we exited the International Section – the Long Man of Wilmington and the White Horse of Uffington. The real ones, standing 70 m tall and 114m respectively, were cut into the turf by the Saxons to expose the chalk on the Sussex Downs, near where I lived in UK. I have always loved seeing them when I go back to visit family.
We finished
Cockington Green Gardens, International Area, Canberra
The displays are quite closely packed together and surrounded by lovely gardens. You can see The Treasury, Petra set in rock near the back in the centre of the picture. Next to it is the Palace of Darius, Persepolis, Iran. by having lunch and iced coffees in the cafe next to the shop. While they were preparing the food we had time to be amazed at the fully furnished 32 roomed Victorian style dolls house, “Waverley”, which stood as tall as a person. The shop, itself, sold a lot of doll house furniture and figures so I treated myself to two minute nursery toys – a golliwog and a little dressed doll - as lovely mementos to go in my miniature collection (and I only paid $3.50 for both!)
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If you would like more images, especially of the international buildings, go to www.cockingtongreen.com.au)
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