Getting to Know London Again

AFTER Colnbrook, I spent the next few nights at another Airbnb in Tarbert Walk, which is in the London Docklands. It's not far from Cable Street, where the famous 1936 Battle of Cable Street was fought between Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and his mostly left-wing opponents.

In those days that part of London, known as the inner East End, was quite rough.

Historically the West End of London was the snootier part and the East End more proletarian. One reason for this divide was that everything east of London Bridge, which unites the dead-centre area known as the City of London to the South Bank of the Thames, was a working port called the Pool of London.

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London Bridge was for ages past quite low to the water. The river probably also gets shallower at that point too, I imagine. And so, London Bridge was the upper limit of navigation for anything bigger than a dinghy.

Here's an old lithograph of the Pool of London, looking eastward from London Bridge with the Tower of London in the background.

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The picture shows lots of ships tied up on both sides. The same view today would show the highly recognisable Tower Bridge spanning the river next to the Tower of London, and no wharves other than for ferries. These days, the modern container ports are still further to the east.

Here's a video I made from a spot right next to the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. As you can see the former Pool of London is all quite different now.

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West of London Bridge, the Victorians built the famous Thames Embankment and Albert Embankment, pleasant riverside parklands that you can stroll along. The difference between the two stretches of the river, west of London Bridge and east of London Bridge, was like chalk and cheese.

(I'm going to be writing about the Tower of London, the Tower Bridge and the Embankments in my next blog post by the way!)

Another reason for the east-west divide was that the usual prevailing wind blew the smoke from everyone's smoky coal fires eastward, along with the smells from highly imperfect drainage and from the various picturesque, hands-on trades of the day such as the tanning of leather by boiling it in urine and dog droppings, and the breeding of maggots to catch fish with.

To add to their misfortunes, the Eastenders were the most heavily bombed of all Londoners during World War II, as the area was even more industrial in nature by that time, as well as perhaps a bit easier for the raiders to get to without being shot down.

Famously, when five bombs did eventually fall on Buckingham Palace the Queen Mother said that now she could look the East End in the face.

Anyway, this whole East End area, including Canary Wharf, is a lot trendier these days. Partly because of the abolition of smokes and stinks, and partly also because it is now more accessible to the downtown area thanks to the creation of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) in the 1980s and 1990s, and the opening of the Jubilee Line Extension of the London Underground in the year 2000.

The DLR is a separate system from the London Underground and I was keener to use it, since it seemed to me that there was less chance of catching Covid than in the more cramped and enclosed system of the Underground. There is a Shadwell DLR station near the Overground one, and I used that to get into town.

I met a friend, and we went to Hyde Park and went to the Princess Diana memorial fountain, and the wonderfully over-the-top Albert Memorial which can be seen in the far bottom left of the map below, just opposite the strange, round Albert Hall, the one the Beatles sing about in one of their trippier songs.

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The parks were full of cute squirrels which are obviously in the habit of being fed by visitors, though officially the grey squirrels, which came into the country from its colonies in America and soon started chasing away the native Eurasian red squirrels, are a pest. But it seems that the British can't bring themselves to poison all the grey squirrels in the way that we in New Zealand poison possums and stoats, etc.

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Some of this parkland was really beautiful.

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And it wasn't far from Buckingham Palace, either.

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One thing I noticed in my wanderings was that just about nobody was wearing Covid masks, though I wore one a lot of the time.

I had booked admission to the city's beautiful Westminster Abbey in advance, for 9:30 am on the day.

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They give you half an hour. Numbers aren't really limited. Quite a lot of people have been buried in the Abbey or had their ashes interred there, and I found their effigies rather macabre. There were also twelve statues of modern peacemakers above the Great West Door, including Martin Luther King.

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As you might expect, stained glass windows are a thing at the Abbey.

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The Abbey is also surprisingly colourful inside, in the authentic mediaeval style (the whitewashed look came later.) Monuments inside the Abbey included one dedicated to Sir Isaac Newton, said by some to be the greatest scientist who ever lived; and who was buried in the Abbey in 1727.

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The banners that fly in the Lady Chapel of the Abbey represent senior holders of the Order of the Bath who get to sit under their respective banners, presumably any time they like and without paying the admission fee charged to the likes of you and me. You might think of this order of chivalry, also known as the Knights and Dames of the Bath, as ancient, since it is named after a mediaeval custom of washing away a knight's sins. Yet in fact, the Order of the Bath was created in the 1700s so that the politicians had something to reward a growing number of middle-class people with, since the older sorts of knighthoods really were only awarded to the aristocracy in those days.

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Here is a short video I filmed in the Abbey:

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One thing my friend and I noticed in the Abbey, and with the suits of armour in the Tower of London as well, was how much smaller people seem to have been in the old days, on average, as compared to now.

I was surprised to see a statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the houses of Parliament. Apparently, it's been controversial since the day it was erected in 1899, due to Cromwell's beheading of the ruling monarch of the time, Charles I, and his subsequent bloody conquest of Ireland, which taken together make Cromwell a foe to monarchists and republicans alike.

I also got some really nice photos of the downtown Tower of London, and the Tower Bridge, and the London Eye, a ferris wheel which takes 800 people at a time, in 32 capsules each holding up to 25 people, free to walk around, though there are also seats. It revolves very slowly, once every 30 minutes or only twice as fast as the minute hand on a clock, so it is possible to get on and off at the bottom without the wheel having to stop.

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The London Eye was opened in 2000, and is also called the Millennium Wheel for that reason. At 135 metres or 443 feet above sea level at the top, the London Eye offered the highest public viewing point in London until that record was broken in 2013 by a public observation floor in a building called the Shard. The Shard's public observation floor is at 245 metres, or 803 feet, above sea level. So, the Shard has well and truly shattered the London Eye's record, though you don't get to go round and round.

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For a long time before, the highest observation point in London was at the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London, near the northern end of London Bridge. The monument, which older sources simply refer to as the London Monument because it stood above nearly everything else at the time, was erected after the Great Fire of 1666. It was designed by the architect Sir Christopher Wren and the scientist Robert Hooke, and completed in 1677.

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You can still climb up it today, via the 345 steps of a circular staircase around a central shaft which doubled as the view shaft of a scientific instrument called a zenith telescope. There is a 24-hour panoramic Internet camera on top these days as well. The inscriptions on three sides of the base are in Latin.

The Monument to the Great Fire is 202 feet or 62 metres tall, presumably to the top of the gilded representation of fire and flames at the top. This height is the same as the distance from the monument to the actual spot where the fire started (in Pudding Lane, which still exists).

The height of the monument's public viewing platform would not be surpassed until very modern times, mainly because the height of most buildings in London was strictly limited by the London Building Act of 1667, passed just after the Great Fire, until the Act was repealed in 1956. The Act also banned construction in wood, putting an end to the more Hobbit-like architecture which otherwise still survives in places like Colnbrook.

In my next blog post, I visit the Tower of London and go for a cruise on the river past the historic Tower Bridge, and visit the great ethnic food neighbourhood of Brick Lane. I'll sum up with some apps, before heading off in the direction of Oxford!