Ridgeway Trip XV: To (the City of) London!

 Our hotel was very Spartan.  I described the basement room before, and it was very difficult to get any air circulation.  If we opened the window wide, propped the room door open, and the hotel opened a back door on the ground floor in the back, we could get some nice fresh air.  The shower was shared between 3 rooms and was the tiniest stall imaginable, with two hooks on the wall and no shelf.  The toilet was upstairs.  We had a sink in our room so we could brush our teeth right at home.  We booked them for the price, but they also bill themselves as an eco-hotel, which mostly means no fancy stuff like good lighting or daily towel changes.  Anyway, it was fine, especially once we figured out how to get some air.

Russell Square Tube station --
attractively old-fashioned, totally inaccessible

Our first day was Teresa's only London day, so we had to show her the big sights.  We took the Tube to the Tower of London.  Kim wanted to go to an exhibit of Princess Diana photography at St Katharine's Docks, which is right next door, so no problem.  I had the idea to get Teresa a wheelchair so as to save her ankle to last all day, and that sort of worked?  We got in, got the wheelchair from a guy who was very grumpy at first and then suddenly turned sweet as pie, and went in.  The Tower is all cobbles, of course, so it was bumpy.  We looked around, got into a corner that turned out to be the raven cages, and sensibly decided to see the jewels as soon as possible, since that always fills up fast.  I don't care much for jewels but it's okay and there were some historical and embroidery things for me.  When we got out, the line was already gigantic, so it was a good thing we went early.  

Breakfast at Tower Hill Park

I like this little park, with some Roman wall, a random
statue of Caesar Augustus, and a nice view of the Tower

St Katharine's Docks

You have to take a picture like this, it's in the rules

Lawn next to the White Tower, usually featuring a raven or so

We looked at the glass cushion memorial (which I've never cared for) and went into the lower bit where you go in and look at graffiti.  And we went into the St Peter ad Vincula church, where Anne Boleyn and Jane Grey are buried, among others.  Also lots of military memorials.  Looked around outside a little more, decided not to go for the armor in the White Tower, and went up some battlements the wrong way to get a look at the medieval apartments.  Some of this was fine, and then I went down to move the wheelchair and said I'd meet Mom and Teresa in the actual apartments.  Those turned out to be a stuffy oven; horrible.  I couldn't do it and we all left again.  The Tower now has various fun animal sculptures out of wire to remember the menagerie that was there; a polar bear, some monkeys, and an elephant head looking over a wall.  

St Peter ad Vincula

We were about out of time, so we left, returned the wheelchair (man still a sweetie), and popped into the shop, where Kim was browsing too.  Her experience had been a bit disappointing, as the photos were blown up but not sharp; they were quite pixelated.  Weird.

Lunch by the Tower -- we were lucky to find a bench!

We decided we had better get fish and chips, and there was a good one right there by a coffee shop, so Kim and I got two full meals to share between us four.  This was the perfect amount and we were all happily full of fish and chips and malt vinegar, so we walked down Lower Thames St -- very busy, and running is quite the thing to do these days, so we kept seeing muscular dudes running during their lunch hours -- we also had to wait for a rental truck to maneuver, which was slightly terrifying.  We were officially on our way to St Paul's, but with diversions as required, and I wanted to stop in at St. Magnus the Martyr, largely because I've been there twice and it's never been open.  It was open!  And there was a service going on.  But we saw the lobby (with an old fire engine wagon in it) and looked respectfully in for a moment.  There was a nice statue of St Magnus that I couldn't really see, and that church is crammed with odd historical stuff.  Someday I'll get in there.

St Magnus the Martyr

Up the street a block or so is the Monument to the Great Fire of 1666, so we stopped by there for a minute.  The pub next to it is called The Hydrant, of course.  We wanted to visit Leadenhall Market, right up the street, and that's a very old open-air market that the Victorians turned into a mall, highly decorated, quite loud, and used as Diagon Alley in the HP movies.  Very fun.  I wanted to check out the Roman basiilica under the back room of a hairdresser and to my disappointment, the place had closed, so it was inaccessible.

This is really not a good photo of the Monument. 
 I should have done better.  Sorry.

Leadenhall Market

The silver dragons with St George crosses
are the symbol of the City of London.

We then walked through the financial district, passing the Exchange, the Bank, and other pillars of solidity.  We also went by the church of St Michael's Cornhill, which is right in the center of the financial district and very very old.  Cornhill, after all, is where merchants first started selling and trading in London, thus the name!  The churcH has pews with doors and fancy carving on each side, and a famous? sculpture of The Pelican in Its Piety, which gave me the chance to be nerdy about medieval beliefs about animals.  

St Michael's Cornhill, now almost
hidden behind giant buildings

A phoenix!  Every pew had these,
and each one different

Financial district

A few blocks down, we went into St. Mary le Bow, which had a service going.  Mom went in to the service, and we other 3 went down into the crypt, which has a cafe.  The crypt is Norman and the upper church has been burned and rebuilt a few times.  The cafe was fancier than I expected --and had a cute "oranges and lemons" dessert, which meant I spent the next two hours trying to remember one line of the nursery rhyme -- but we ordered 3 sodas so everybody could use the bathroom.  

St Mary-le-Bow, Norman crypt

Eventually we got to St. Paul's, and joined a highlights tour with a very nice man that told us lots of history.  Then we walked around to see the American chapel in back, and say hi to Sam Johnson and John Donne.  We decided none of us needed to climb up to the Whispering Gallery, much less the tippy top -- Teresa's ankle wasn't up to it, we were all tired and we'd done it before.  So we went down into the crypt to see Nelson and Wellington and lots of Pre-Raphaelites and who knows who all.  Then we sat down to try to figure out what to do next.  Everybody was pretty pooped.  We decided to go home and get some dinner.

Wellington's memorial.  We were actually
impressively bad at photo-taking in St Paul's.

I really like these mosaics. 

John Donne preached at old St Paul's.
His memorial survived the Great Fire and was reinstalled.

As we got back to our own Tube station, we saw an ad in the elevator for an exhibit on lost libraries of the Holocaust, and Mom and I determined to visit it.  It was just on the other side of Russell Square, and we had about 20 minutes to see the information before closing time.  It was a very good small exhibit on the massive amount of Jewish literature lost in the war, and how people are still finding volumes here and there. 

A converted shelter for hansom cab drivers; now a cafe of course

Russell Square

As we shared out weird bits of Tesco groceries (hummus, cheese, charcuterie, pitas), somebody proposed going to a show, don't they have last-minute tickets in London?  So we looked, and decided to go see The Mousetrap.  What is more London-touristy than seeing the Mousetrap?  We took the tube to Leicester Square, walked a little way, and go to the St Martin's Theatre, where Mousetrap has been playing for something like 72 years.  It's a smallish theater and there's not really a bad seat in the house, and it was so fun!  Just very Christie and fluffy.  What a great idea.  The trains home were packed solid but we made it.