Thursday, 3/28/01
The airplane ride was uneventful. Late, of course! British Airways served us both dinner and breakfast. I wasn't all that hungry, but ate it anyway. Pretty decent food and wine- the latter came with dinner and seemed to be an accepted accoutrement. It was English wine and a bit on the sweet side, but better than you would get flying coach on an American airline. We didn't get much if any sleep. JT was subjected to the "human juke box woman" as he described her, who babbled at great length and volume to her husband through much of the flight. I was seated a row ahead and mercifully could only hear snippets of the monologue.
Heathrow was much the same as any airport. Customs was perfunctory.
The morning was partly cloudy in London. Due to the Tube (subway) strike, we did not have that as an option, so we took the Heathrow Express train (15 min into Paddington Station). From Paddington (which had marvelous ironwork), we walked to our hotel, the Columbia on Kensington Park. The hotel was small and a bit old-fashioned, but perfectly adequate. There were no washcloths or shampoo, but plenty of towels and we had a private bathroom, which is something that we had desired, being effete Americans!
After checking in, changing shoes and washing up, we set out for St. Paul's. It was morning in London and the mist gave Kensington Park a lovely watercolor effect.
London seemed overall just big-citish, but the differences are in the details. Streets upon streets of whitewashed Georgian frontages, old buildings, a higher proportion of old to new buildings and narrow streets.
There are ample examples of tedious modern architecture. A particularly egregious example was the lovely old church behind the hotel, which had a hideous concrete addition that clumsily (and unsuccessfully) tried to echo the graceful lines of the older building.
No such excrescences marred St. Paul's, however. The glittering magnificence of the interior was awe-inspiring. The weight of centuries of ritual lies over the place. The ceilings had elaborate mosaics, there was carved and gilded wood carving around the altar. We did not climb the tower due to JT being short of breath (he started the trip with a cold, but it really only slowed him down the first day).
From there we walked to the Tower of London. We were both dragging by then, so we stopped for lunch (and later tea). The lunch spot was a sandwich place called "Pret A Manger", which had good and reasonably priced sandwiches, and became my favorite for grabbing a quick cup of tea to go. The sprinkles that had started coming down as we scurried into St. Paul's had cleared and the sun was out.
The Tower was the epitome of "castle"- a fortified residence, complete with moat, towers, crenellations, and arrow slits. The Beefeater's tour was quite good, although for the only sit-down part of the tour, I threatened to fall asleep. Though picturesque the Tower did not appear to be a comfortable place to live. Easy to see why it was abandoned in favor of more commodious residences by the royal family. One wonder's what the Beefeater's quarters are like. (They live on-site with their families.. the job prerequisites are that one must have at least 22 years of service in the armed forces and have won the good-conduct ribbon.)
In its many years of service, the Tower was used as an armory - (there was a picture of a former armorer who bore a startling resemblance to Mark Adam) - and a prison. There was quite a bit of well-preserved (and sometimes quite artistic) graffiti left there by former prisoners.
The walk back to the hotel was painful, but we were stubbornly determined to see more of the city.. besides the Tube was on strike and we were disinclined to try and unravel the mysteries of the bus system.
We looked for a restaurant, but most places seemed to be bars, with minimal if any food. Several of them claimed to have food, but to our puzzlement on entering seemed to have no way to order. Finally we settled on a Weatherspoons, a pub chain recommended to us by a UK filker, and discovered that in pubs, food is ordered at the bar, which explained a good deal of our confusion in the earlier places.
We found ginger beer in a convenience store on our way back to the hotel. Quite delicious, I must drink more of it while I am here.
Why are many of the doorknobs located in the center of the door instead of on the side where it opens? The hotel and many buildings on the street all had this feature.
At the hotel at last, we dropped like stones, despite the early hour- after all we had been up over 30 hours and had walked 8-plus kilometers!
Friday 3/30/01
Another gorgeous day dawns in London. I sampled the English breakfast that came with the hotel room. Blackcurrent jam, I discovered, tastes rather like a cross between blackberry jam and elderberry jelly. Then we hobbled off to Paddington to get tickets to Bath. The train runs beautifully smoothly and quietly. It has welded rail and concrete ties, JT thinks. Definitely good maintenance. The countryside is green and rural. As at home, the railway right-of-ways tend to be shabby and full of trash though it was in general cleaner than the US. Villages of varying size dot the landscape. The streams are high and many of the fields are flooded. It looks like the reports of a lot of rain this month were not exaggerated.
The fields are all edged with hedgerows. The trees are not yet budding, but the grass is green and the gardens are all full of primroses, daffodils and forsythia.
The train let us out at the bottom of Bath, which is on a hillside sprawling across the river Avon. The pump room and Roman baths were amazing and well presented. The audio-tour gadgets were a bit verbose and over-dramatic, but otherwise informative and well-done. To see the Roman stonework (still visible at the water level) and the drain for the pool, still functioning exactly as designed after 20 centuries of use was quite amazing. Some beautiful mosaics were found as well, and much stonework. More is believed to be buried beneath Bath's huge gothic abbey, but I can't blame them for not wanting to dig it up! They had found stones from the original Roman structures used to build more modern buildings. Other ruins were found underneath some houses.. the owners had complained of seepage in the basements, but when the Roman ruins were discovered under them, the houses were all taken and demolished (bet those people don't complain any more!).
I did not venture to taste the waters, as prior mineral water experience and popular report lead me to believe that the taste is foul!
Despite the growth of algae, the water looked surprisingly inviting steaming in the cool air. The prospect of a 120° bath without hauling and heating water must have seemed quite as miraculous to the Romans as it does to us.
The Romans devoted their temple complex on the site to Minerva, presumably due to her similarity to the pagan goddess who the previous inhabitants worshipped on a shrine at the same place. It was amusing to see all the offerings to Minerva sitting in a case in the museam - coins from all over the Roman empire, jewelry, curses and prayers. And then you look at the modern museum exhibit, and every available depression in the exhibit is filled with coins flung by modern visitors. Perhaps we aren't so different from the ancient tourists. In one place the museum was encouraging this, inviting visitors to "support archeology" by depositing their change. Talk about catering to people's natural instincts.
We stopped for a sandwich, and I tried a "Bath bun" which turned out to be a very sweet bread with a few currents on it.
From there we walked to the costume museum, which covered about the last 300-400 years. The amount and quality of the embroidery on the older costumes was amazing. The later fashions (especially the70s) were appalling.
From there we went to #1 Royal Crescent where we saw a furnished Georgian house. A marvelous example of how the better folks lived in bath in the 16th century. I learned that currants are a sort of raisin, cotton batting covered with satin is used as a wall covering if you are very rich. Limestone blocks may be easy to work but are porous and inclined to let the damp in. Blancmange is a sort of white custard, perhaps flavored with fruit. Dogs were used to turn spits and churn butter- quite likely into the early 20th century despite laws forbidding the practice.
From there we walked still higher. The similar frontages gave the place a harmonious but occasionally boring appearance. We looped across the top of the tourist district, looking for more museums and an ATM. We found the "Building of Bath" museum, and had just enough cash left for the admission. It proved fascinating- it was all about the surge in construction in Bath in Georgian times and how the building of Bath was accomplished. The land was very unstable, and there was quite a lot of terracing needed to build on the steep hillside. Indeed, in the 16th-17th centuries there were several houses swept away by landslides.
They had an amazing scale model of how Bath looked at the time done by a local modeler. Planes and templates for making fancy grooved moldings and carved woodwork. There were carvings in various stages of completion and painted in different schemes. There were stone cutting and carving tools.
There was a lot of land speculation and chicanery that went on at the time. And since the architect- who had no formal training- was responsible for seeing that the work was done to a standard of quality and allocating payment to the various carpenters, masons, plasterer, etc., it is not hard to see why some of them got into trouble!
Mahogany was imported from the West Indies, marble from Italy. Windsor chairs don't really come from Windsor, they were made in a bunch of nearby communities and distributed from Windsor. Stone steps which appeared to be cantilevered, but actually only extended 6 inches or so into the wall were only sunk into the wall to keep them from turning. They had about 11/2-2 inches of overlap that transmitted the force to the bottom step.
Snapple is bottled and sold in Europe, since I found it in a coffeeshop in Bath. We also stopped in a hobbyshop and picked up a few details for the train layout. Plastruct (scale plastic material for modeling) is imported but England has a local equivalent for Woodland Scenics (model train scenery materials). And trains from Bath to London at rush hour are standing-room-only, at least for the first few stops!
From there we took the Underground back to the Soho/Charing Cross area, where we had previously spotted many restaurants (naturally after we had eaten the night before!). Being hungry, we stopped at the first respectable-looking Indian place we saw.
The Underground is rightly called "The Tube". The tunnels are very small and round, perhaps only 12 feet or so in diameter, and the trains are round as well, making them seem like long round earthworms gliding through the tunnels. Must be hard on people who have claustrophobia. We didn't find the SF bookstore. We did find more excellent ginger beer.
Saturday 3/31/01
English porridge is what we would call oatmeal. The taxonomy of snack food is not completely clear.. potato chips are crisps, tortilla chips appear to be called chips, and we have no idea about other snack food (i.e. Chilli flavored Hula Hoops). Chili is apparently spelled Chilli in British.
In the morning we went to the Museum of London. An excellent and fascinating museum about the history of London. A quite amazing number of Roman artifacts survive, not just stonework, but delicate jewelry, tools, glass, wood and leather. After the collapse of the Roman empire, London was apparently just abandoned until it was rebuilt by King Alfred in the 9th century.
The difficulty of doing archeology in London must be amazing. Many of the things found in this century appear to have been unearthed after the WWII bombings.
The café at the museum was excellent. It had more ginger beer- quite excellent, though the non-alcoholic "Old Jamaican" that we have been finding in convenience stores is quite as good.
There was much more at the Museum of London- medieval furnishings, rooms, exhibits on the Great Fire. An exhibit on WWII and the role of women therein. Pictures of bank tellers at "weekly rifle practice". A mother and daughter working at a locomotive yard- the pride in the straight figures of these women was something to see. The men objected to the employment of women in these jobs on the grounds that it was an excuse to lower wages. The women were heavily propagandized to do their utmost for the war effort- with the result that some of them worked 12-18 hours a day, seven days a week. It really drove home the very real fear of invasion that the British lived with during the war, though.
A modern exhibit showed items, 1 each, donated by as many clubs and organizations as the museum could locate. Each was asked to explain why, in 50 words or less, they had chosen the items that they did. The exhibit was to show the power of groups in people's lives. There were walking and cycling clubs, religious and political organizations. Each was eager to share their mission.
From there, we went on to Sir Joan Soane's.. uh, collection. Calling it a museum is perhaps a bit too organized. The man was a pack-rat, a bibliophile and he had a passion for antiquities. The house was filled with bits of classical sculpture, casts of intaglio gems, ornate keys, paintings and more bits of sculpture. There were lovely stained glass windows, tiny mazelike corridors and every room had more stuff. Soane seemed to have an interest in Napoleon- there were a couple of paintings and two trays of medals that were struck to commemorate his various victories. He also had a sarcophagus (Seti I) for which he threw three days of parties to show it off when he acquired it. There was a "crypt" in the basement. Every nook and cranny of the house is filled with the evidence of the collecting urge gone completely whacko!
From there we walked (on complaining feet) to the London Transport Museum, where we were able to trace the progress of the tram through its obsolescence and its current revival. Fascinating accounts of the building of the Tube. The "tube" consisted of bored tunnels that went deep beneath the city (and some of the stations are indeed very far down), while the Underground was made by cutting a trench, laying track and covering it over. The original Underground trains were steam, but the Tube was electrified from the start- and the technology was only barely available at the time. It was the Tube company that built the first power station, which was the largest one in Europe for some years, and sold electric power to consumers for lighting to help finance it. The same power station, after several upgrades, still supplies the largest part of the Tube's power today- it is visible on the south side of the Thames.
There was also much discussion of trams and buses. The buses and trains were actually consolidated by an American financier.
Despite the intrinsic interest in the exhibits, there appeared to be a great many adults who had stopped in the café after shopping and let the kids run wild in the museum. (No surprise that many of the interactive displays were broken or out for repairs.)
We found more Indian food for dinner- yum! And saw a bit more of the city taking an indirect route back to the hotel. I have told my feet to stop complaining, or I shall do it again tomorrow. As expected, they didn't listen. Oh, well!
Sunday 4/1/01
I tried a different English breakfast this morning. British bacon is similar to Canadian- thick and without a lot of fat. The sausages were much like American breakfast sausages though.
We found that rail work on the line would delay going to Hampton Court Palace, so we opted for the Victoria and Albert Museum instead. En route, we took in the Albert Memorial, which was definitely over the top, though not as treacly as I had expected.
The V&A was huge- far more than we could begin to see in one day. We started in the fakes and forgeries area. Items mostly beautiful and artistic in their own right, though not what they pretended to be.
From there, we looked at plaster casts of antiquities. These were exchanged between a number of European countries after an agreement was signed at the Paris Exhibition. These were amazing and often huge- some were over two stories high and very intricate. These types of castings used to be quite important but the V&A claims to be one of the few left with such an extensive collection. Also, the good quality of the castings allows scholars to study them even though some of the originals have degraded due to weather and pollution.
The museum has many fine tapestries and a huge collection of textiles. Some of the lace was so fine that I can barely see the stitches. I can't imagine how anyone saw to make it.
The collection of ornamental wrought iron was remarkable. JT liked the exhibit on printmaking. The glass and ceramics were beautiful but overwhelming.. some ceramics had very fine pierced designs. I was extremely aware of my vast ignorance in this area. There was an interesting film on how glass is made.
There was a collection of old musical instruments. The workmanship was amazing; but I wanted to know how they sounded. Or if not those exact instruments, what a cittern sounds like, for instance.
There was a large collection of Constables. Fine jewelry from many eras, Indian art, more sculpture. It is the eclecticism of Sir John Soane writ large.
Saturated with priceless antiquities, we moved on and strolled along the north bank of the Thames to Westminster Pier, and then across the river to Waterloo station. From there, we headed back to catch the end of the Science Museum's hours and look at Charles Babbage's mechanical calculating machine (the difference engine). We barely had time to look and the other exhibits looked so fascinating, we decided we had to go back if there was time later.
We finished with dinner in South Kensington and strolled back through Kensington Park. The gates opposite the hotel were locked by then- but we were disinclined to walk around, so like the uncouth colonials we are, we scaled the fence and retired to the hotel to drink our ginger beer in triumph. This was a new brand, "Idris" and not as flavorful as the "Old Jamaican".
Monday 4/2/01
Since the day turned out fine, we went to Hampton Court Palace, despite it being a later opening day. The palace was immense- fortunately for us, only part was open, otherwise we would have been there for days.
The gardens were lovely despite it being so early in the season. The "wilderness" area was filled with masses of daffodils and narcissi, a few crocuses not yet gone by, violets and other flowers that I did not recognize. There was plenty of cheery yellow forsythia as well.
The state apartments of Henry XIII and William III were huge- 3 to 4 times man height. There were acres of tapestry. Utterly gorgeous carved decoration, lots of art (much of it classical in allusion and risque in execution). (There were no pictures allowed inside the palace, but I found an authorized internet tour online if you want a look for yourself.)
The Tudor kitchens were enormous. A pot of perhaps 30 gallons was permanently inset over an oven, presumably to make soups and stews. There were rows of ovens for baking, a spit with an ingenious weighted device to turn it at a constant rate. It still looked like cooking then was an awful lot of work!
There was a small but old and well-cultivated maze. It was filled with screaming schoolgirls in matching blue skirts who waved virulent colored ices at passersby. But still pleasant. There were two long-suffering trees at the center, still hanging on despite the centuries of initials carved in their bark.
There was a magnificently painted cottage by the river that was currently being shown, but available to rent. At times it was also a "grace and favor" residence. The formal gardens would have been lovely later in the season.
The palace was built around 3 courtyards, where we met various costumed guide/interpreters who showed various areas of the palace. One was dressed as "Sir Thomas Coningsby", a privy councilor to King William. He talked about how person would seek an audience with the king. By the end I think all the tourists felt decidedly underdressed and altogether common!
The Royal Chapel had a magnificent Tudor ceiling and a lovely organ. It is still used and there is a choir there. A pity we could not have heard it.
After seeing the palace, we explored the village a bit and browsed in a quilt shop. Our train was canceled, but we caught the next one, ate Thai food back in London and walked back to the hotel. It rained a bit after dinner- practically the first bad weather we have seen.
And our trip is complete- as happens everywhere else we go, the natives stopped JT to ask for directions. And since we were carrying an excellent street map, we were able to tell them.
Tuesday 4/3/01
Quiet grandeur and solemn honor. The famed alongside the obscure and forgotten. The memories of the oldest worn to dust beneath the feet of the pious and the curious alike. And all for ashes and the shadows of rotted flesh.
We started at Westminster Abbey. Beautiful but sombre. There were a lot of dead people. The place seemed much more full of them than St. Paul's did.
From there we went on to the Cabinet War Rooms. Essentially, after the end of WWII, they simply turned out the lights and locked the doors and left things as they were. An excellent exhibit and one that conveyed the sense of danger and urgency of the war years.
From there we walked on toward the British Museum, passing St. George's Hanover Square en route. So odd to see the fixtures of Regency romance in solid stone in front of you.
The British Museum was also huge. No, bigger than that. The Elgin marbles were sadly damaged. A pox on the soldiers who collected heads as souvenirs. The Rosetta Stone was smaller than we expected.
The Indian art was beautiful, but alien to our western eyes. The medieval treasures found scattered about Britain were astounding for their antiquity and beauty. It roused childhood memories of dreaming of finding buried treasure. I'd have had a much better chance had I lived in Britain. The central court with its restored reading room was white and classical. Inside the pale blue Regency color scheme restored looked lovely with its ornamented panels. But it was eclipsed by the three tiers of bookshelves with attendant balconies that circled the room.
We finally left, having only scratched the surface- but still saturated with museum-going. But we struck out past Russell Square to go to the new British Library as there were several items there that we wanted to see.
JT quoted Prince Charles, who had apparently compared the building design to a collection of sheds, and this was unfortunately rather apt. An undistinguished modern design, though at least it is brick and the the bright red trim does ornament it somewhat. It was easy to forget the exterior when we saw the wonders inside. The magnificently illuminted Lindisfarne Gospels had Celtic knotwork borders so tiny that it was hard to believe it could have been painted by hand.
There were magnificent illuminated bibles and manuscripts. Two of the four extant copies of the Magna Carta, a Shakespeare folio, more historical and artistic painted documents. A sound library. For the bibliophile, these exhibits must not be missed. (Note: Some of these beautiful manuscripts can be viewed on the British Library's online service).
After the library, we walked out to Regents Park, took a turn around the park and then walked up past Euston to Camden Town. Camden was lovely, with rows of smaller Georgian houses painted in a rainbow of pastel colors, with tidy gardens and the characteristic curving streets.
We located the Folk Arts Center, Cecil Sharp House and then found some dinner, returning in time to catch the beginning of the open mike there (they call it a "Folk Club"). It was held downstairs in a tiny cramped bar, but it was blessedly non-smoking and soon packed with performers. Three fiddles, a concertina, several guitarists and many vocalists. It was very like a coffeehouse at home, with people lending harmony on the choruses and joining in at every opportunity. We stayed through the first half of the show and then walked back to Camden Town Station in a light drizzle. (We detoured on our way to the hotel in search of ginger beer.)
Wednesday, 4/4/01
We were up early, dragging somewhat after the later-than-normal return the night before- but determined to see all that could be seen in our remaining hours in London. We walked through Bayswater and Kensington in light rain- the coldest day we had yet seen but still relatively mild.
It was quite windy when we arrived at the Science Museum, which we had thought looked interesting in our flying visit several days before. It turned out to be interesting indeed- the display cards had not been "dumbed-down" as they would have been in a similar American museum. The exhibit of steam engines and mill machinery was unmatched with a clear description of each piece, its history, and the technical advance it represented over prior art.
There was a similarly informative exhibit on gas production, which explained quite cogently the essentials of producing gas from coal right up through modern propane supply and North Sea drilling.
I particularly liked the model gallery, which had many fine examples of various looms, engines and forms of transport.
We finished again at the Babbage gallery, a moving tribute to a technology 50 years ahead of its time and the man who created it. I must remember to seek out Babbage's autobiography- it sounds fascinating. The Museum built Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 and did the first calculations on it in 1991, four weeks before the 200th anniversary of Babbage's birth. If he could have seen it, the old man would have said, "About damn time." JT pictures him as a classic hacker, suffering an extreme case of feeping creaturism* (*Creeping featurism is the software phenomenon where the product is delayed again and again because new features keep being added.)
When we left, it had stopped raining, and we Tubed over to Forbidden Planet. It was an impressively complete source for all thing fannish, from comics and media to books and magazines. I procured a copy of Interzone and picked up a couple of books not readily available at home.
From there we caught the Tube back to Lancaster Gate and finally stopped at a restaurant that we had spotted near the hotel that served cream teas. Clotted cream turns out to taste rather like a mixture of cream cheese and butter. The scones were rather like biscuits with golden raisins in them. With jam and tea they were quite tasty. "What could be more English than this?" I asked. "Tea and scones overlooking Kensington Gardens?" "It could be raining," JT replied and a few drops immediately started sprinkling down. We hastily removed to a table under the canopy to finish.
From there it was back to the hotel for luggage, a stroll to Paddington Station where we could check in for our flight (highly recommended!). We managed to be relocated to the child-free upper deck of the 747 in the process. Apparently for safety reasons they don't put children upstairs. And then we caught the Heathrow Express back to the airport.
The trip home was uneventful except for the good curry dinner on the plane. We arrived back in Boston by 9 pm and were on a subway back to the car very shortly thereafter.
Altogether, a marvelous trip. May we not be too long in returning.