Giveaways
IN this post, I visit the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge and the former port, and go for a ride up and down the river in the River Bus taxi. Then I tour the embankments west of London Bridge, and go on to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, a surrealist exhibition at the Tate Modern, and the foodie area of Brick Lane. And I include more photos of Westminster Abbey. All of this still only just scratches the surface of a vast metropolis!
The Tower of London is considerably more ancient than the Great Fire monument. In its time it has been a fortress, a prison, and a palace, and as far as I am aware even all three at the same time! It is actually a huge complex of which the tower, as such, is just one part.
Here are a couple of the Tower's mediaeval interiors:
For ages past, a small group of ravens has made its home at the tower. Ravens are large black crows of ill-omen, traditionally associated with battlefields and gibbets where executed criminals were strung up to rot. No doubt the prospect of feasting on the head of some traitor, handily mounted on a spike, was what attracted the ravens to begin with.
Anyway, despite that macabre significance, ravens are also very intelligent and playful, a bit like the New Zealand kea in that respect. A superstition also holds that if the ravens dwelling at the Tower all depart, or even if their number falls below six for very long, the Crown will fall and so will England. During World War II the Luftwaffe bombing scared away all but one raven, which can't have helped morale very much.
Here is a video I made of scenes at the Tower, including the rooms where the Crown Jewels and an extraordinary number of maces or sceptres are kept (do they wear out in use?). And, of course, the mischievous ravens.
As for the nearby Tower Bridge, it can be opened to let ships through. The lower deck of the Tower Bridge splits in the middle so that each side can tilt upward (each half is called a bascule) and, when that happens, you have to use the upper deck to get across. This means that cars can't get across until the bascules are lowered again.
Traditionally, London Bridge, which is located about one kilometre to the west of Tower Bridge, was the upper limit of navigation for tall-masted ships. But such was the pressure of trade that both banks of the Thames from London Bridge eastward were busy working waterfronts for centuries past. Even as late as the mid-1960s, the banks of the Thames west of Tower Bridge were still lined with dock cranes, especially on the south side, where the cranes famously dipped to honour Winston Churchill's funeral party in April 1965. You can see the famous crane-dip, which looks a bit like a Mexican wave, nine minutes into a British Pathé newsreel made at the time.
In the erstwhile Pool of London port area where the cranes were dipped, there is a shopping arcade called Hay's Galleria. It was developed as a wharf and a warehouse in Victorian times, famously handling 80% of the dry produce imports of London at one time.
For today the area is indeed all gentrified, and the cranes are gone. As the city has sprawled outward and as ships have grown larger, so the working docklands of London have migrated well to the east of the Tower Bridge. Having said that, the bascules are still raised quite frequently, as river traffic has priority over road traffic.
Like a lot of the buildings in London and in England generally, the Tower Bridge looks much older than it really is. It was actually opened in 1894 but designed in a deliberately old-fashioned, gothic style to blend in with genuinely mediaeval buildings such as Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. And also, as a reaction against some of the grimness that had been brought by the Industrial Revolution.
Again, this too is an aspect of the invention of tradition. The Victorians could have built a bridge that didn't look hundreds of years old, but, deliberately, they did.
I took a walk along the famous embankments of the Thames, the products of a great Victorian effort to shore up the river's crumbling banks and turn them into attractive esplanades, raised some way above the normal level of the rive by great stone walls.
There are either two, three or four embankments depending on how you count them, all west of London Bridge, the bridge that divides low-boat navigation from tall-vessel navigation on the river. The Victoria and Chelsea Embankments on the northern bank of the river (its true left) are often jointly referred to as the Thames Embankment (this gets confusing) while, on the other side, there is the Albert Embankment.
On the Victoria Embankment, I saw the great Egyptian obelisk called Cleopatra's Needle, and a bronze sphinx to match.
Cleopatra's Needle was erected more than three and a half thousand years ago in the pharaonic capital later called Heliopolis, just south of Cairo. It was moved, along with a sister obelisk, to a site in Alexandria at the command of Cleopatra VII, the one we simply call Cleopatra. Almost two millennia later, it was found in a fallen-down condition by the troops of Napoleon in 1798, who gave it its name along with its sister obelisk which was still standing, calling them both 'the needles of Cleopatra'.
In 1819, the Egyptian government donated it to the British, but it was too hard to move in the age of sailing ships. Later on in the century, by which time steam power had come to the fore, the British heard that a powerful local landowner proposed to break it up, and so this time it was loaded onto a steamship and taken to London, to be re-erected on its present site in 1877.
In the background of the photo just above, you can see lamp standards with curious-looking fish twisted around their bases. These are a lot more whimsical. The first ones on the Thames Embankment were installed in the 1870s. As the design was so popular, more have been installed over the years. The one below, from the South Bank, is dated 1986 but still in a rather quaint Victorian style of lettering.
It was spring, and there were so many beautiful flowers along the embankments as well!
There are absolutely loads of statues and memorials along the embankments, as well. Here are a few that caught my eye.
Westminster Abbey is worth a second look, too. I only went there once, but here are some more photos. The first one is the northern frontage, built around the Great North Door. This is actually older and more genuinely mediaeval than the western frontage, and it is gilded around the doors with gold that shines when the light catches it, which perhaps is not very often as it is permanently in the shade.
Gothic architecture was by no means purely decorative. The ornate patterns of stonework were modelled on tree branches and designed in such a way as to spread the load around large windows and to allow wide high spaces, thus making cathedrals less dingy than they used to be beforehand, and creating more of an opportunity for the use of stained glass.
And by the way, if you think the design for the ceiling in the last photo looks as though it might have been copied from a mosque, well, yes, it might indeed. Such is the argument of the architectural historian Donna Darke's new Oxford University Press book Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe. Along with coffee and Arabic numerals to replace the clumsy Roman MDCXVIII variety, certain architectural ideas percolated westward into Europe as well. Of course, the European gothic soon evolved in its own direction thereafter. You only notice these connections in the details, now.
Here's another photo, this time of the nineteenth-century statesman Rober Peel, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and also the founder of London's Metropolitan Police, rather improbably dressed in a toga rather than a suit or a Met Commissioner's uniform for that matter.
Westminster Abbey is not the same as Westminster Cathedral, a 20th-century Roman Catholic cathedral a short distance away. Nor with Westminster Hall, another mediaeval building nearby.
I also took a ride on the Uber Boat water taxi, called the River Bus, which I thought was a good way to travel because it is out in the open, once again with a reduced risk of catching Covid. The terms Uber Boat and River Bus seem to be used interchangeably, but, as I understand it, Uber Boat is the operator and River Bus is the service, contracted out to Uber Boat by Transport for London. I don't know if Uber Boat operate anything else.
The River Bus runs the length of the Thames in the London region, from Putney in the west to Barking Riverside in the east, just past the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, stopping off at pretty much every place of importance between. At least the service does as a whole. There are several boats, each with varying itineraries, so it is important to get on the right one.
Here are some photos from the upper deck of the River Bus, where I was virtually alone because most of the passengers huddled inside.
Just below the Shard, I saw the World War II-era museum ship HMS Belfast.
I went to Trafalgar Square, of course.
I should come back on some equally sunny day and get photos from in front of those light standards, not behind them!
Wandering about, I also took in some generally quirky street scenes, like these:
I popped in to the Victoria and Albert Museum. where there was a fairly over-the-top display of Italian Renaissance Art, including a plaque dedicated to a military commander from Verona called Malaspina, who died as far back as 1407.
And the Tate Modern Gallery, where I saw an exhibition of surrealist art, a radical art form that developed in the early twentieth century. I think that I am a surrealist artist myself!
For something to eat, I went to a gritty place called Brick Lane, where another kind of artwork was very much in evidence.
It's nicknamed Curry Lane, where you get all the best curries in the world. And Tibetan and Chinese food.
There are also two bagel shops selling bagels, or beigels, which both seem to be as busy as Fergburger in Queenstown, NZ! They're known to locals as the yellow one and the white one. As to which is best, the British entertainment guide Time Out recommends the one with the shortest queue!
I walked around the Docklands area by night and got some more photos, such as this one of the Tower Bridge by night.
I met my friend Ozan, who is born and bred in London, but whom I met previously in Stockholm in 2015. He lives in northeast London and is a landlord. He told me that in lockdown he looked after his sick parents. He believes that London is broke and it is broke, look at the debt levels, and the house prices that still keep going up. A one-bedroom flat around the Docklands area would set you back 340,000 pounds.
Along with the Royal Family, a lot of the property in downtown London is also owned by foreigners such as people from Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and, more notoriously these days, the Russian Oligarchs.
There is a whiff of madness in the air. Boris the Prime Minister got drunk at parties during lockdown, creating the Partygate scandal, and he refuses to leave despite being fined.
There was also a bizarre story about anonymous sources who claimed that the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, was distracting PM Boris in Parliament by crossing and uncrossing her legs. No-one from the sensible party, as Monty Python used to say, has been willing to support these claims.
Another Conservative MP is in trouble for viewing porn on his tablet in Parliament in ways that could be read over his shoulder, if read is quite the right word for looking at the pictures. He said he clicked on it by accident.
I heard at the same time that a man suffering from genuine mental health issues had also just conned his way into the barracks of the guards guarding the Queen at Windsor Castle, near my original stop-off at Colnbrook, by claiming to be a friend of the regiment's padre. Nobody checked his ID: according to one of the soldiers, “It was only later when he started talking about how he had worked as an ejector-seat test pilot and had some organs replaced that the chaps started to get suspicious."
Well, anyway, a couple of days of arriving in London, where just about nobody wore a mask, I tested positive for Covid after successfully managing to avoid the disease all the time I had been in New Zealand. I took the test after getting quite debilitated while hiking around, hardly able to carry my bags and throwing up by the side of the road. I was in bed for two days after that, probably worse if I hadn't had all my shots. As you can see from some of the photos, I did not wear a mask absolutely everywhere, so maybe that was it.
But I was really blown away by London. "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Thus wrote Dr Johnson in the 1700s, meaning women too for that was the way they said things back then. And it's still as true as ever.
Here is the operator website for the Uber Boat or River Bus, which includes links to apps: thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/ticket-information.
The Transport for London website for the River Bus, which is strictly speaking a subset of Uber Boat services (I think) is here: tfl.gov.uk/modes/river/about-river-bus.
There are heaps more apps and websites about London itself, of course.
This post follows my last one, Getting to Know London Again. My next post will be about Oxford.
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