What I did in a week in London

I think the main reason I travel is to see things I've long wanted to see. I was just now going over the photographs and videos I took over there, laid out in rough chronological order and I was reflecting on what I saw, what I did, what was possible to see and do and whether the trip was a success. This as I am preparing to visit Paris in much the same way.   I underestimated how big London was and how little time I had there.  I will have to go back but not until I have visited some of the other places I've wanted to see, which might take a few years.

 Sometimes the most rewarding things are the things that happen unexpectedly or those things you notice about the place, the country.  Other things did not impress me much while I was experiencing them but in retrospect they impress me a lot.  Then of course there are regrets I have about the things I didn't see, the things I didn't do.  I didn't talk much to anyone while there for one thing.  I didn't wander over to have at least a peek in the lobby of the BBC.  I just photographed the outside of the building. 

Some people were holding a strike protest a block away on the other side of Regents street, complete with a blow up rat as a mascot *, but somehow I had other things I wanted to do rather than cross the street and see what that was about.  I wish I had.  It might have been interesting to see an industrial action.  Maybe I was afraid of being arrested or something. Mostly I looked at things and discovered things.  

As it happened this is what I did and saw in London, and this list probably would be different from your list.  I guess I was a typical tourist in a way, but I did my own thing too.  

Day 1.  I flew from Chicago O'Hare to London Heathrow, getting in rather late, when the bus service to hotels was about to shut down for the night which would have necessitated taking a cab. 

Fortunately I got there just as the last bus wandered by to take people to the various hotels.  While such services are free in Chicago, in the UK you pay about 4 pounds to take the bus.  I spent the night at the Holiday Inn at the airport, which was nice but expensive and except for all the fire doors you had to go through to get to your room, about the same as staying in any fairly nice hotel in the US.  A mirrored elevator, a spacious room, a decent bed, and all that. 

Even the TV wasn't that much different.  They even gave a rundown of the weather in the US although the prime focus naturally was on weather locally.  I watched news, talk, weather. 

Apparently somebody had bombed the Boston Marathon and Margaret Thatcher had just died and this was news all over the world.  It was front page news as they tracked down the suspects that whole week.  You scarcely had to buy a newspaper over there because there are many excellent free ones.  And naturally some people thought Thatcher was great and others thought she was awful.  Most people seemed to be in the middle somewhere.  I liked Margaret Thatcher.  Somebody had to take the TUC down a notch and she was the woman for the job. Socialism is somewhere between a very old, bad joke and hell.
*Interestingly enough they use these blow up rats used in labor protests in Chicago too. 

I mean for one thing, there was the novelty of the traffic driving on the opposite side of the streets.  I found parking was more logical and less haphazard than it was in Glasgow.  The streets are narrow and they go in all directions.  A compass is always a good idea in such a place in addition to a good map because coming up out of the tube it is very easy to get your directions confused.  
 

The British love their newspapers

Anyway, what did I do?  Day 2 I took the Picadilly line down to central London and got off at Oxford Circus, nearest stop to the place I was staying, then after I checked in, walked over to the British Museum and spent several hours there.

British Museum

  Then after supper I went over to see Picadilly Circus

Piccadilly Circus

at night and visiting the huge souvenir shop known as "Cool Brittania".    

Day 3 I got up and went a short distance down to Green Park, ate my breakfast, and then looked at Buckingham Palace

Moi at Buckingham Palace

from the outside the gate.  You can only tour the place in August when the family is in Scotland.  Otherwise it is a large building attended to by a few fur hatted troops in red marching around.  Then wandered down the street and toured the Buckingham Palace Mews since the art gallery was undergoing renovation and I got to look at all the carriages and limousines that the royal family used for their various functions. 

They must have had about a dozen different ones.  This was mildly interesting.  I guess it was about as close as I was going to get to seeing a Royal.  I also bought a bunch of post cards featuring all the various members of the royal family and some royal souvenirs, as many as I dared to take back with me.   I proceeded to Victoria Station which was all torn up and under construction, but nevertheless a grand commuter stations.

Unlike in the US there are public rest rooms there but you have to pay to get into them.  I guess it was worth 50p for privilege of peeing. Mind those fluids and those solids too.  (After all, if they are going to be plying you with all manner of food and drink, it is cruel and not a small bit hypocritical not to not help with exit strategies for those consumables too.)
 There were a couple of theaters nearby one featuring "Wicked" which later in the week I went to see.   I then walked back up Victoria Street.  Along that street there were some interesting things and other things that were rather ho hum.  I liked Westminster Cathedral and would have gone inside except that they were holding mass in there at the time.

Westminster Cathedral, completed in 1903

  I was able to visit the tower which afforded a nice inexpensive view of London.  Or at least the Pimlico part of it. 

Office buildings and government buildings, some new some old.  There was New Scotland Yard on the left, which is where the metropolitan police or the equivalent of the FBI operates in London. 

I doubted they were open to the public but then I didn't really try.  I continued up the street and just missed getting in on a tour of Westminster Abbey which closes early on Saturday.   So I probably will never see the inside of the place.  Actually I did see the inside of the place for a minute or so, having gone in the exit by mistake.

Westminster Abbey

It's kind of the official church of the British Royal Family, but then I don't think they allowed pictures in there anyway.  I just walked around it and admired it from the outside.   So I took in the houses of Parliament (again from the outside, since they wanted about 25 pounds to tour the inside, something I regret I did not do, actually.

The Houses of Parliament

  I ended up going to the Jewel House instead which was some ancient building which was a repository for the Crown Jewels in its day, and later on some kind of mint or weights and measures repository.   Not all that interesting.   What was interesting were the political demonstrations, which probably happen mostly on Saturdays when people have the day off and can make it in to see them. 

The Anti-Morsi demonstration

It was a demonstration against the current Egyptian regime of Mohammed Morsi, who apparently wasn't very nice to Egyptian Christians. They were shouting into a microphone and chanting statements in English such as "Why Why Why must Christians Die" etc.  This was across the street from the Houses of Parliament and close by Westminster Abbey.  (Later in the week I heard another one in the evening close to where No. 10 Downing Street was located, a place which is blocked off and

Emmeline Pankhurst British Suffragette

heavily guarded which doesn't surprise me any more than noticing that the White House these days seems more like a fortress than a home.  I went to the park near the Houses of Parliament and looked at the Thames, looked at where Rodin's Burghers of Calais was missing, being then renovated

 

Pedestal of the Burghers of Calais

(probably scraping decades of pigeon shit off them) and admiring a statue honoring Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragette.  

Day 4 was a Sunday, so I figured it was a good day to visit Highgate Cemetery.  The tubes open later that morning.

  I walked over to Goodge Street, to catch the North Line, a small tube station where there is no access except via a large elevator, though for the motivated I suppose you could do the long flight of steps from the underground. It took a while and was a long ride.  The A-Z Atlas I had was very confusing, the critical area being right in the binding area on maps 64 and 65 but I got off at the right stop, which was Archway.

  Immediately around the station it looked a bit scruffy but as you headed up the hill it seemed to get a lot more prosperous next to the cemetery.  There was the Whittington Hospital and Middlesex University and pubs and a very spare looking McDonalds up that way. 

The Cemetery is a big one, but a venerable one.  The West side has fallen into ruins, more or less and is not considered safe for people to wander about on their own.

  I took a tour of the place led by a very nice female guide.  The East side is newer and is I guess not consecrated ground, and is the final resting place of many dissenters and atheists, including most famously Karl Marx.

Karl Marx grave in Highgate East

 

On the other hand they did make an exception for Alexander Litvinenko buried in Highgate Cemetery West though a convert to Islam, and murdered probably by Russian agents who slipped him some radioactive thallium that took a week or so to kill him.  They are beautiful cemeteries both, however, consecrated or not.  The east one lets you wander as you like  but also charges admission, was better maintained, contained more modern burials such as that of Hitchhikers Guide author Douglas Adams

Neither Adams' or MacLaren's grave, but that of someone else who liked dogs

and Malcolm MacLaren among many others.   This is what I did instead of having a look at the London Marathon.  They'd just bombed the one in Boston and I felt that some lone guy with a backpack such as myself would find myself harassed by the gendamerie.  I got back to my room, then went down after a rest to see Charing Cross,

Charing Cross, considered the center of London

which is another big train station and visited Trafalgar Square for a second time and the looked at the government buildings down there and saw another political demonstration across from Downing Street, 

A local policeman and me at Trafalgar Square

this one in support of some religious political figure that the British government was threatening to send back to his home country.  That was about it for Sunday. 

In front of St. Paul's Cathedral

Day 5 I went to see St. Paul's cathedral, the Millenium Bridge, the Tate Modern, and Southwark Cathedral.  I took the tour of the inside of St. Paul's which did not allow photography, but I did climb to the top of the dome and take a lot of pictures of London from up there, which was stunning.

Panoramic shot taken with Olympus SP590uz

  The Millenium Bridge afforded fine views of the river, and the Tate Modern is an enormous museum of modern art housed in a decommissioned power plant. 

The Millennium Bridge with the Tate Modern on the other side of the of the river

By the time I was done I was suffering severe museum fatigue and just wanted to sit down.  They did allow photography in there and I did take a lot of pictures featured elsewhere.

The main hall of the Tate Modern

  They showed the art thematically.  Naturally there was a large museum shop.  They were having a Roy Lichtenstein exhibit but I didn't pay extra to go in there. They did accept donations however.   Southwark Cathedral was older than St. Pauls but a lot smaller, naturally. 

The Nave of Southwark Cathedral

They did allow photographs inside the cathedral.  

Day 6 I got up early and went to Brompton Cemetery near Earl's Court. 

It is a fine old cemetery, and open to the public.  I learned later that it is also a well known pickup spot for gay Londoners.  I saw people cutting through the cemetery or roller blading through it.  I even saw children on bicycles going through there.  There were some contemporary graves and older graves dating all the way back to the 1800s.  There was a military section which was interesting. 

It featured a lot of the victims both in and out of uniform who died during the first and second world wars.  It also featured the graves of Russian Orthodox  believers and priests forced into exile after the Russian Revolution.

Earls Court was itself kind of a funky neighborhood.  I wish I had had more time to explore it, but I was off to see other things.   After a rest, I went to see the Tower of London. 

It is a massive complex part prison, part palace, part jewel depository, part museum, and part gift shop.   On the day I was there, there were actors in period costume discussing the political controversies of the 17th century, like why does Charles II have a Catholic wife?  

I wish I had walked around the battlements before heading home.  Museums get tiresome quickly.  All the tourists seemed to be speaking French.  The crown jewels were interesting but then they didn't allow pictures to be taken of them.  I don't understand why.  That night I went to a performance of "Wicked" which is an imaginative extension of the story of the Wizard of Oz, which kind of reinterprets the events presented in the book and especially the 1939 film. (a film which I think it is fair to say if you haven't seen  you must have lived all your life in a remote cave without electricity.) 

A musical wherein the Wizard turns out to be an even greater turkey than he was in the movie.

It was an entertaining musical,  even if I was viewing it from the balcony. It helps to be independently wealthy if you are going regularly to the theater.   God knows I could have seen a different show every night for a month if I had had the time and money.  And modern big productions nowadays anywhere in the world require structural and mechanical engineering to put on. 

Day 7 I got up early and took a bus downtown for a change.  It would have taken me to Westminster and ultimately to Brixton (another place I regret missing) but my mind wandered and by the time I managed to get off I was across the river in Lambeth on the other side of the tracks. 

Lambeth

My intention was to visit first the Churchill War museum created under the streets in Westminster, but because I had overshot the mark I decided to go to the Imperial War Museum instead.  When I got there I discovered it was under renovation and a sign suggested I come back in July, so I merely walked around the grounds and admired the big WWII era guns mounted at the entrance.  I guess it is strangely appropriate that the Imperial War Museum was in a former life "Bedlam", one of the oldest mental hospitals on the planet. 

the British War Museum

  The area doesn't look quite as prosperous as the north side of the river. 

Attempting to teach Algebra to a bunch of inner city kids who could scarcely perform simple arithmetic was discouraging to say the least.

There are examples of buildings bombed, and new ones put up in a dreary postwar malaise.  I guess what marks London in this area and presumably many areas are the historic buildings surrounded by gaps like a formerly full set of teeth with half of them knocked out a legacy of the Second World War.  

Two denizens of Lambeth (or is it Southwark?):  I have never bothered to color my hair.  It looks so bad when it grows out in the roots.  I wear gray clothing. The person on the left is more my style.

I walked west on Lambeth Road under the tracks and into the presence of Lambeth Palace, the home of the the Archbishop of Canterbury. I looked around but did not go inside. 

Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury

The garden museum didn't much interest me. I crossed the river on Vauxhall Bridge and after discovering that I had left my remaining batteries on the bus to Brixton I went off to get some replacements, which were expensive and somehow not as good as the ones I had brought with me.

Millbank Tower: No thanks, we've got plenty of these things back home.

  I walked briefly up Millbank road, had lunch in a snack bar in the lobby of a modern office building, the likes of which you can see dozens of similar examples in Chicago and really just about any other major city in the world.  Then I went to the Tate Britain, which contains the older paintings in the Tate collections, and focusing almost exclusively on British painting.  It was the best museum I visited in the UK.  I wish I had visited the National

One of the galleries of the Tate Britain

 Gallery off Trafalgar Square, but that will have to wait.   After that I went back to Pimlico station and went up one stop to Westminster station again and  went over to visit the Cabinet War Rooms and Museum.

Cabinet War Rooms:  the mannequins were quite convincing.  Did they enlist the skills of Madame Tussaud?

  It was fascinating to see the place where the British government holed up during the worst phases of the bombing by the Germans.  I even saw what I later confirmed were the scars  on the stone facade of the Tate Gallery of a bomb that must have hit Atterbury Street.

Superficial damage to the Tate Britain near the entrance caused by a German Bomb during WWII

I probably could have seen other examples if I had gone looking for them.  Modern buildings are everywhere and clearly historic preservation is not consistently a priority.  And after 70 years, of course, much of it has been effaced.   

 Day 8 was my last full day in London.  I decided to go for a long walk.  I walked west on New Cavendish Street until I got to Marylebone High Street.  I found Daunt Books, which was a very nice bookstore on the West side of the street. 

Daunt Books, Marylebone:  A dangerous place for bibliophile.  I mean how would I get them back in my luggage?

I spent perhaps over an hour in there looking around and finally buying a book by Howard Jacobson called "Whatever it is, I don't like it".  I then walked North along that street to the grave of Charles Wesley

I wasn't even looking for it when I found it, and even spoke to a lady in the churchyard and confessed to having some Methodist connections in my past.

and other Methodist worthies and thence to Marylebone Road and walked west along it, past Madame Tussaud's and the Princess Grace Hospital, turning South on Baker Street, made famous in the A. Conan Doyle stories of Sherlock Holmes,  to Portman Square and then to Grosvenor Square, where sits the American Embassy at least until they finish the new one. 

They wanted the eagle to be bigger, but the British made them tone it down.

Here there were a number of statues honoring American presidents, namely Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan.  I sat at a bench and ate my lunch of sandwiches and pasta and looked around, wondering how many of these people were spies.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square

At the entrance to the building stood guards with really intimidating looking automatic weapons and the ever present barriers diguised as planters that are supposed to stop truck bombs.  Up the street was the Bank of Kuwait and a fair number of burka clad women in black wandering around.

After the embassy I walked west on Upper Grosvenor Street and got to Park Lane which is a wide and busy street. (You call that a Lane?)   I walked up to where the Speaker's corner was located (no speakers on a weekday) and looked also at the Marble Arch.

Marble Arch, in the NE corner of Hyde Park

  Much more impressive than the Marble Arch itself was the giant horse's head not far distant.  

This inevitably reminds me of that memorable scene in the Godfather.

Then I wandered through Hyde Park, found a tree to piss behind, and crossed the Serpentine into Kensington Gardens, visited the Peter Pan statue

Peter Pan : My role model.  Maybe if you don't grow up you will avoid other unpleasant realities of life, like death and taxes.

on the other side of the long water and visited Kensington Palace, or at least the outside of it.   

Queen Victoria, who was born in Kensington Palace

Beyond the palace was a row of embassies on a quiet leafy street, one of which was the Israeli Embassy.  Again policemen outside with powerful automatic weapons at the ready. A sign pointed out that photography was forbidden on this street, so I did not take any pictures of the place.  I resumed photography once I got to Kensington High Street.  I went to theWest Kensington Station and took the tube East to Westminster so I could catch the next Thames River Cruise to Greenwich.  

Apparently normal schoolchildren, tragically afflicted with an ability to speak fluent French.

The cruise was pleasant enough and enabled me to see the river and the stuff along the river. 

The London Eye

It stopped across the river at the London Eye to pick up more passengers and then as we moved along a crew member did a running commentary on the things seen along the way. 

We stopped again at the Tower of London picked up more passengers and proceeded down the river to Greenwich.

The Tower Bridge

  This part of  London is more industrial and less scenic.  A curious collection of tall buildings including One Canada Square exists in a bend in the river known as the Isle of Dogs. 

The Isle of Dogs:  Home of the Tall office buildings, and more going up.  How many construction cranes can you see in this picture?

Like La Defense in Western Paris, this is where the tall buildings live, away from the historic center, unlike in most American cities, where the tall buildings are the Center and history be damned. 

We arrived at Greenwich in the late afternoon. 

Greenwich University (foreground, formerly the Royal Naval Hospital), the Queen's House (white square building) and on the hill (center-right) is the Royal Observatory.

It has its own little business district and the Cutty Sark museum as well as the British Naval Museum.  It also has the Royal Naval Hospital for Sailors, built by Christopher Wren in 1692 which is today the University of Greenwich and a music conservatory.  It was a nice and warm spring day and the students were sprawled on the grass or playing with round footballs. 

Others were working on their tubas or cellos somewhere with the windows open in the college.  I had decided to take the cruise back to the starting point, which was probably a mistake. I would have liked to go a little closer to the Royal Observatory and explore but I was committed to going back the way I had come.   I could have easily taken the tube back and saved myself some sunburn.  As it was my Pentax started acting up which I now believe was owing to the crappy batteries I had bought somewhere.  Oh well it was almost the end of my trip.  Since getting back it has been just fine with new batteries. 

At the time I thought I would have to get it fixed.  After the river cruiser docked at Westminster I took one last walk home after dark up Regents Street to my room on Bolsover Street, did my laundry in the wee hours and took the Picadilly line back to Heathrow.

Goodbye.