Dinosaur – Steel City Snapper photography

I was reading a blog post yesterday afternoon on Shawn Granton’s Urban Adventure League site. In it he spoke about “The Lighthouse”, a wooden lighthouse that stood in the back yard of one of the properties he sometimes cycled past. On a recent bike ride he had a chance to go past the same location but it was no longer there. The Lighthouse was ephemeral and no more.

This triggered a memory. Not of a lighthouse, but of the Wellingborough T-Rex.

About thirty years ago I, and other members of the team I worked in, would attend meetings in London. The East Midlands Main Line between Sheffield passed through Wellingborough en-route and there, before you got to the station, the line went past a scrapyard. Nothing particularly interesting about that. Except for the T-Rex.

The T-Rex stood tall, peering over the scrapyard fence at the railway line. The dinosaur was clearly modeled on the older, tail-dragging depiction of dinosaurs that became extinct when Jurassic Park and its ilk arrived on the scene, but it was a T-Rex nonetheless.

It stood there for years until, one day on a trip to London, it had gone. I felt a bit sad at this. It was a familiar landmark and one which I hoped to always be there. But it wasn’t.

However, today, after reading Shawn’s blog post featuring The Lighthouse, I searched online for “Wellingborough dinosaur” and, lo-and-behold it was right there before my eyes. Not only did I find a picture of it in the scrapyard, but also discovered that when it had disappeared it was because it had made a new habitat for itself at The Muslo Arms, a pub in a nearby village called Finedon.

The pub has now closed and been converted into flats. I don’t expect the T-Rex lives in one of them and I have no idea where it may have gotten to now, but I hope it’s somewhere out there still.

This little trip down memory lane has made me quite happy.