London Day 3 – the British Museum

September 28, 2017August 13, 2024Leave a comment

On the third day of my trip (how am I only on day 3?), I went to the British Museum and the British Library. There were no photos allowed in the latter, and I’m not sure I could have gotten decent photos if there were, as their displays of historic books (including the Magna Carta, in its own room tucked away from the rest) are under glass in an extremely dim room.

The former, I’m going to have to go through with less commentary than usual, in the interest of actually getting this uploaded tonight in my limited pub time.

Exterior of the museum, with detail of decorative figures:

Note the striped tabby tail on this very fashionable Egyptian cat:

I have to learn to read these someday:

Here we start in the museum’s collection of statues from the Parthenon:

Depicted with almost as much detail and life as the Greeks’ human subjects is this Molossian hound.

Widely described as fierce and loyal dogs, Molossian hounds were used by wealthy households as guard dogs. Despite a vicious reputation, this sculptor depicted a surprisingly familiar, puppy-like smile.

Who’s a good boy!!??

After the museum and library, I got dinner at an Art Noveau era pub called the Blackfriar.

Next up: cute cows and showoff birds.

London Day 2 – Hyde Park & Natural History Museum

September 21, 2017August 13, 20241 Comment

Let’s pick up where we left off in Hyde Park. Running through more or less the middle of this Royal Garden is a manmade lake known as the Serpentine, so named for its twisting shape. Along the Serpentine, there are cafes and tea rooms, ice cream stands, places to rent paddle boats, even a little roped-off area for swimming.

Also populating the Serpentine in great numbers are geese and ducks, terns and gulls, songbirds, herons, and especially, swans.

Several kinds of swans, even.

Swans are known for being graceful and elegant birds…

… geese, less so.

Further east, towards the Kensington Gardens, is the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.

This is an oval waterway set into a gentle hill; water flows down both sides to pool at the lowest end and be pumped back to the highest.

Around the 165×260 foot loop of Cornish granite are areas with different textures and geometries, as well as jets of water or air bubbles. Signs welcome visitors to paddle their hands or feet in the water.

From the south exit between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, I walked to the Victoria & Albert Museum, which holds a collection of 4.5 million works of decorative art and design. It contains a spectacular array of art from around the globe, with a particularly beautiful collection of Islamic art from the 7^th to 20^th centuries, including tile, painting, calligraphy, and textiles such as the 16^th century Ardabil Carpet.

While there, I had a cup of tea and an Earl Grey infused scone in their Renaissance-style Centre Refreshment Room, built in 1865.

Again, a walk—by this time, I was getting pretty tired—to the Natural History Museum, a few blocks further down Exhibition Road.

This cathedral of nature stands in testament to 300 years of research and progress in the natural sciences, beginning with the collections of Irish doctor Sir Hans Sloane, and including specimens gathered by the likes of Sir Charles Darwin and Sir Richard Owen.

From the ceiling of the central hall hangs a ten-ton blue whale skeleton.

Displays throughout the museum include skeletons, taxidermied animals, and specimens of thousands of organisms preserved in glass jars, some more than a hundred years old.

Until early 2017, a Diplodocus skeleton was suspended in the hall. The blue whale, stranded in Ireland in the late 1800s and kept in storage for some 42 years before finding a home in the museum’s Large Mammals wing, was unveiled in July.

From the back of the hall, framed by staircases that lead deeper into the museum, Charles Darwin surveys his domain.

… some would say, judgmentally.

You can take the stairs up…

… and around to the front of the hall, to view the whale and your fellow tourists from above.

The museum is really built like a palace or a church, with striking red brick and carved details in the unlikeliest of places.

Next up: the British Museum and a very good dog.

London Day 2 – West London

September 18, 2017August 13, 2024Leave a comment

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!

London Day 1 – Trafalgar Square

September 13, 2017August 13, 20241 Comment

From Westminster, I set off northeast towards Trafalgar Square, home of the National Gallery (including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Dining Rooms). It’s not a very long walk—only about two tube stops—and since it was only my first day, my feet weren’t already sore.

Along the way, I and many other tourists stopped for photos of the Horse Guard.

Like the red-coated, bear-fur-hatted Buckingham Palace guards, these are stone-faced young men who seem to hold perfectly still at all times, though their horses are not held to quite the same standards. Prominent signs warn onlookers, “horses may kick or bite!”

The Horse Guard is part of the procession involved in the famous Changing of the Guard, which we will glimpse next post.

The National Gallery sits overlooking Trafalgar Square…

…in which twin fountains flank a monument to Admiral Horatio Nelson, who died at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, his likeness set atop a 169-foot-high column and guarded by four enormous bronze lions.

The National Gallery contains works spanning the 13th century to the year 1900, with galleries laid out by artist, style, and subject. One room houses several Dutch Renaissance artists’ depictions of rural Italy; an octagonal chamber contains four works by the same Italian painter representing earth, air, fire, and water (with scenes from the New Testament worked stealthily into the backgrounds). Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh share several rooms; the National Gallery hosts, among others, van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers.

Finally, after hours of walking, I looked for a place to sit down and refuel.

Just off Trafalgar Square is a visually uninteresting 300-year-old Anglican church—that of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, so named because it stood in an open field when originally built. A popular concert venue with both afternoon and evening performances, St. Martin-in-the-Fields contains a beautiful antique pipe organ in an otherwise plain interior.

In the vaulted tombs below, of all things, there is now a café.

The Café in the Crypt helps fund the preservation of the church. Buy cold fare or pastries a la carte, or choose a meat or vegetarian hot entrée, and enjoy a tasty meal… perhaps with a few fellow diners unseen by mortal eyes.

Next up: Buckingham Palace, and a lot of noisy birds.

London Day 1: Westminster

September 8, 2017August 13, 2024Leave a comment

I made it!

Long flights and time changes have gotten a little harder since the last time, but I survived. I’m sightseeing with extreme intensity! Hence why it’s taken me this long to finish my first blog post. This post isn’t even going to be a full wrap of my first full day in London, since there were so many photos. Most likely, content will be spaced out over the next few weeks since I will be doing much less sightseeing once I reach Wales.

Let’s get this thing started so that I can go to dinner!

I started Tuesday at Westminster Abbey, now technically a church and not an abbey (and for 16 years in the sixteenth century, a cathedral), and the site of the coronation of every English monarch since its construction.

Most of the architecture is in the Gothic style, characterized by pointed arches and flying buttresses, even though its construction lasted well beyond the 16th century.

Above the Great West Door are a series of statues representing ten twentieth-century Christian martyrs. A few might look familiar… they include Martin Luther King Jr and Óscar Romero.

Worshipers may enter from the west, but visitors must buy tickets and use the doors under the north facade.

There were no photos allowed inside, so I can’t show you the way the light filters in through the ancient glass; the tombs and dedications to hundreds of England’s most accomplished scientists, musicians, poets, and authors; the poppy-wreathed plaque beneath which is buried a single unknown soldier from World War I, to whom countless monarchs and world leaders have paid their respects; the painted screen and silvery pipes of the church’s organ, or the lace-like carvings in the Lady Chapel’s vault ceilings…

… so let’s go outside!

The walkways of the Little Cloister are full of heavy wooden doors where canons, clergy, and lay officers live and work to this day.

Beyond the Little Cloister is the College Garden, where (in the old days) the Abbey’s monks grew food, medicinal herbs, and plants for inks and dyes.

Westminster School, one of the oldest schools in London, borders the College Garden.

The garden is now more of a park, with flowerbeds, trees, walkways, and benches.

Let’s bee friends.

The exterior of the Lady Chapel makes use of Late Gothic architecture’s characteristic flying buttresses.

I walked by the Houses of Parliament, but as they aren’t in session, visitors couldn’t go in.

London pubs are always pn these beautiful, timeless corners, many with colorful flower baskets and easy-to-spot signs.

But more about pubs later…

Next up: Trafalgar Square and lunch with the dead.

Doing the Thing

let's goooooooooooooo

Category: england

London Day 3 – the British Museum

London Day 2 – Hyde Park & Natural History Museum

London Day 2 – West London

London Day 1 – Trafalgar Square

London Day 1: Westminster