Ridgeway Trip XVIII: To Church!

It was Sunday, and we thought we'd like to go to a church service.  It wasn't easy to choose a place, but eventually we settled on the 10am service at Westminster Abbey, which was a Matins service -- not a full one with Communion and a sermon, but about 40 minutes of music and scripture reading.  So that was lovely, and we got to sit quite close in.  They were clearly expecting many more people for the full service later on.

We exited through the cloisters

The Abbey is flying a Ukranian flag!

A public library!  Is it still?

Probably not still a public baths

Then we walked, through showery weather, down to Tate Britain, one of the major art museums.  This was not the Tate Modern, but one that goes through British art history in chronological order, and also has a giant Turner collection.   We went through many rooms full of very famous paintings, but focused on a room of William Blake, some Hogarth, and two large rooms with lots of extremely famous pre-Raphaelite works -- Ophelia, for one, and plenty of others.  

By the time we got out, it was well past lunchtime and we'd forgotten to eat our snacks.  We needed to get to the Pimlico Tube station, but on the way we spotted a pub offering Sunday roast dinner -- just what Kim wanted to try before going home.  So she had roast dinner, and Mom and I had appetizers.  Halloumi fries are reliable friends.  Then we found the Tube station -- which features wall art of famous Tate paintings -- and made our way to Cannon Street, with the plan of finding the Mithraeum.

The Mithraeum was one of our goals.  It's a recreation of an ancient temple of Mithras, based on the one found in London in the 50s, and it is inside the Bloomberg building.  It's supposed to be open on Sunday afternoons, but it was not.  It was closed to change out some sort of other art installation.  The website said nothing whatsoever about this! We were very irritated.  So we went around the corner to say hello to London Stone, which is now installed in a new house where the old grate was.

Romans used it!

We decided to walk towards St Paul's and go see the Millennium Bridge, which is for pedestrians only.  It was the first time we really got to enjoy looking at the river, and we pointed out Southwark locations (such as the Globe theatre) and looked down at several mudlarkers on the shore.  (I want desperately to be a mudlarker, but right now it's closed to tourists and newbies.  They gave out too many permits or something.)  Then we thought we'd go back to the National Portrait Gallery; Kim wanted to see the Six Wives exhibit and it was supposed to be cheap on Sundays.

Another terrible selfie

It was cheap on Sunday mornings, but not in the afternoons.  Kim went in anyway, and Mom and I went through the rest of the museum that we'd missed before because we were too tired to see everything.  Kim found her exhibit enthralling -- it was full of interesting stuff.  

Book cover embroidered by Katherine Parr

Then we were looking for a Costa coffee shop so Kim could buy millionaire bars (which are just like my toffee bars).  There are Costas all over England; you can't look around without seeing one.  But the first one we found, at Leicester Square, turned out to be inside a huge movie theater, the Odeon.  Which has a Batman statue standing on the roof.  But there were no millionaire bars.  Back out and across Leicester Square -- which is full of touristy shops like M&M and Lego, and was crowded with people out for a good time on the weekend -- we found another Costa and successfully concluded the mission.  Then we walked through the Chinatown district and found a classic fish and chips place, Poppie's, to eat dinner.  There was a button on the wall that claimed that if you pushed it, English sparkling wine would appear.  Was it true?  Does England have sparkling wine?  Apparently the answers were yes and yes, and it isn't cheap either.  So we did not press the button.  It's an extremely tempting button though.

We had ended up near Piccadilly, so we wandered around there for a while, though it was getting on for 7pm and shops were all closed.   We found Fortum and Mason's, which is extremely fancy and famous for its window displays.  We learned, by the way, that Piccadilly means a fancy lace collar.

The legendary Fortnum & Masons!

It has fancy lamps!

By this time we were done, so it was back to our room and the end of Kim's last day in London.

I have to tell you about this poster!  It was on the wall next to our hotel room, and we found that it was in fact very warm below, so we were like "LIES!!"  There was a matching one for winter that said, correctly, that it's warmer below.  But I got interested and looked it up.  When this poster was printed, it was perfectly true that it was nice and cool in the Underground (and still warmer than a January day).  But there isn't all that much in the way of heat ventilation, and over the decades, the constant movement of trains and all the people have gradually and steadily warmed everything up.  Now it's often very warm down there, and they're trying to figure out ways of building heat sinks to move heat up and out.  I also got interested in exactly how the trains work, because there are four rails on the tracks.  Two are for the wheels and two move the electricity.  The electric rails are easily identified by the many mushroom-shaped ceramic insulators.  I really like the Underground system; I think it's just amazing and that almost everything about it is great.