London is a big, big place, especially in comparison to many historic cities where you can walk between major sights without too much trouble. I tried to make a casual location-based plan for each day, including a morning and afternoon sight in the same general area, with lunch and dinner planned around these. You can detect this if you map out where I spent my first day, Westminster Abbey to Trafalgar Square being a fairly short and linear route. I didn’t mention that evening’s dinner—at a bank-turned-pub (not too uncommon a transition, as physical banks close in favor of online commerce) called the Counting House, a long-ish walk from my hotel.

I didn’t do quite as clever a job planning my day on Wednesday.

I took the tube to Victoria Station, from which it’s an easy stroll to the Queen Victoria Memorial, in a roundabout in front of Buckingham Palace.

The palace itself is not especially palatial, and much less so than the Houses of Parliament. It looks like an old government building. In fact, it was originally built in 1703 as a townhouse for the Duke of Buckingham, and did not become the monarch’s residence until the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837.

The Queen Victoria Memorial was designed in 1901 and completed in 1924. The figures on the monument itself, apart from Queen Victoria herself, represent Winged Victory (gilded bronze), Constancy, Courage, Motherhood, Justice, and Truth—all of which, according to sculptor Sir Thomas Brock, being “qualities which made our Queen so great and so much beloved”.

At the corners of the monument are figures representing Peace, Progress, Agriculture, and Manufacture. At 82 feet, it is the tallest monument to a queen or king in England.

Here behind the fences around the monument and the palace gates, tourists crammed in, smartphones and cameras at ready.

I ended up being in the wrong part of the plaza to catch most of the action (the ceremonial flag-waving and marching and shouting all happens within the gates in front of the palace, while I was still standing by the memorial statue), but there were a few interesting sights in the roundabout, including:

The Horse Guard, referenced earlier.

A dog in a little guard uniform.

A marching band, who treated us to some generic marching tunes as well as Our House by Madness.

Lots of police horses.

The Horse Guard again, coming the other way.

And with that, the fuss was over, and the crowds dispersed. At this point, I had meant to go to the British Museum and British Library, but I hadn’t realized that they were much farther away than I thought, or that Hyde Park was quite so close by.

Hyde Park is a whopping 350 acres, while the adjacent Kensington Gardens tacking on another 270. Together, they are about two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park.

Its features include a rose garden designed in 1994…

… and an unusual Weeping Beech.

Beyond the rose garden are miles of paved and unpaved pathways. And just like the vastness of Hyde Park, there’s quite a bit left for me to cover in Day 2, so I’m going to leave this here… I know I promised you noisy birds, but those are coming up next!