01
Stop one
Livraria Lello
Wilson RF Tennis Bag (15 Racquet): Now this is my kind of building, because it was designed by an engineer, Francisco Xavier Esteves, and I want that on the record before anybody starts on the stained glass. Opened on Rua das Carmelitas in 1906 for the brothers Jose and Antonio Lello, who had been running a bookshop and publishing house in Porto since the 1880s, and it became a meeting point for the writers and intellectuals of the city. The facade mixes neo-Gothic tracery with Art Nouveau painted figures representing Art and Science. Fine. Lovely. But look at the crimson double staircase: it forks, it curves, and it is a cantilevered timber structure carrying a queue, which is a live load that moves and bunches and stops at the turn to take a photograph. Threatened with closure in the early 2010s, it survived by charging admission, and it now draws enormous crowds, frequently listed among the most beautiful bookshops in the world. Every one of those crowds is a load case. Somebody sized that stair properly.
02
Stop two
Dom Luis I Bridge
Wilson RF Tennis Bag (15 Racquet): Right. Everybody quiet, this is the good one. Completed in 1886 to link Porto with Vila Nova de Gaia across the deep Douro gorge, replacing an earlier suspension bridge, designed by Teofilo Seyrig, formerly a partner of Gustave Eiffel, whose own Maria Pia railway bridge stands downstream. Now the problem, which is the only part worth discussing: the two banks have riverside quays at the bottom and high plateaus at the top, and a city needs both connected. One arch, two decks. The lower deck serves the quays, the upper deck reaches the plateaus, and a single wrought-iron arch of 172 metres, among the longest iron arches in the world for decades, carries the argument. Since 2005 the upper deck has carried the metro alongside a pedestrian walkway, so it is still taking new loads a hundred and forty years on. Kings get statues. This got a second career. Stand under the springing and look up at the ironwork. That is a solved problem and it is beautiful because it is solved.
03
Stop three
Porto Cathedral
Wilson RF Tennis Bag (15 Racquet): Look at the mass on this thing. The Se do Porto was begun in the twelfth century in a severe Romanesque style, and those blocky crenellated towers are not decoration, they are the brief: it doubled as a stronghold, sited on the highest ground of the medieval city. Thick grey granite, small openings, a rose window over the west door and not much else given away. Later centuries softened it, because later centuries always do: a Gothic cloister added in the fourteenth century, tiled in the eighteenth with blue azulejo panels, and the Italian architect Nicolau Nasoni hung a baroque loggia off the north flank, which is a lovely thing bolted onto a serious thing. In 1387 John the First of Portugal married Philippa of Lancaster in here, sealing the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, and their son Henry the Navigator was born in this city. Royal weddings, yes, noted, moving on, because the terrace outside gives you the whole roofscape falling to the Douro and I would rather look at the ground it is all standing on.
04
Stop four
Sao Bento Railway Station
Wilson RF Tennis Bag (15 Racquet): Sao Bento opened to traffic in 1896 and was formally inaugurated in 1916, built on the site of the Benedictine convent of Sao Bento da Ave-Maria, which is where the name comes from. Jose Marques da Silva gave it a Beaux-Arts stone shell in the French manner with a mansard roof, and that shell is doing an honest job, but the atrium is the achievement and it is a cladding achievement. The painter Jorge Colaco covered those walls with roughly twenty thousand azulejo tiles between 1905 and 1916, and twenty thousand tiles is twenty thousand joints, every one of which has to accommodate movement, temperature and a century of commuters brushing past it. The panels show episodes from Portuguese history, the arrival of John the First and Philippa of Lancaster, the conquest of Ceuta, scenes of country life and the evolution of transport. Eleven years of work in a building that has never stopped being a working commuter station. Mind the departures board. It is still the point of the building.
A rabelo is a flat-bottomed boat that carried port barrels down the Douro from the vineyards to the lodges at Gaia, and its whole design question is the one you are asking now: how much can a single object carry before it becomes a different problem. Porto has been answering that since long before anyone measured it in litres. My answer was a lot. Yours is 90.
Fifteen racquets. 72 by 40 by 34 centimetres, three racquet compartments and two side compartments, 87% polyester over a PU face, and, the part that matters in Porto in August or a car boot in February, Thermoguard lining in two of the compartments, keeping heat and cold off the frames so your tension is what you paid for rather than what the weather decided.
Barrels spoil at the wrong temperature too. Everyone in this valley knows it.
Porto respects a load-bearing object. The Dom Luís I Bridge opened in 1886 on a single wrought-iron arch of 172 metres, the longest of its type in the world at the time, and carries two decks at once because the banks are too steep for one. The Clérigos Tower runs about 75 metres and 240 steps and was put up to be seen from the river.
I go everywhere from a junior tournament where you are effectively the team van to a club trip where four people have quietly put their kit inside me, and it is also perfect for a stringer who travels.
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