Trip to London, England, December 9-16, 2010
We left Knoxville about 3:30 PM Thursday, Dec. 9 and landed at London Gatwick airport around 7:30 AM, Friday, Dec. 10 via Atlanta. The flight was without problems but as we descended through the clouds the landscape was white with snow around London in the dim morning dawn since it had snowed a few days before. The weather was generally cloudy during our stay in London – typical English grey days. The temperature ranged from 32 to 45oF and it only sprinkled a few minutes a couple of times. We didn’t really feel very cold since we brought warm coats and knit caps that could cover our ears and there was not much wind. However, this was an unusually cold winter and if it continues for the rest of December then this would be the coldest December on record.
Clearing customs and getting our luggage went fairly quickly and we decided to take the train into Victoria Station in London which is about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. Deciding which train to take and figuring out how to get a ticket was confusing but a fellow behind us in the ticket line helped us by explaining the best train and how the auto-ticket machines worked. We didn’t have any trouble based on his instructions although it did cost about $50 for the tickets. We later learned that we had taken the express train which only stopped once. A train that stopped more often would have been much cheaper. While boarding the train Janis observed the warning printed in large letters on the edge of the platform “Mind the Gap,” i.e., the gap between the edge of the platform and the train car. That has become sort of a catch phrase in some British literature. The ride took a little over 30 minutes and was occasionally a time travel through a Dickensian landscape with decaying, sooty-looking carcasses of dead factories and with bridges and rail infrastructure a century or more old. The train itself was modern but very crowded. Our car had cloth bench seats and about half of them shared a table with the opposite seat where many commuters were working on their laptops. Victoria Station was huge with lots of shops around the periphery of the central grand room that had huge exposed steel trusses high above. It was just about the peak of the rush hour and so many people were flooding through the station to work. We did stop at a tourist office to get directions to our hotel and to buy a London Pass which would get us into several attractions.
Hotel Luna Simone was about a 10 minute walk down Belgrave Avenue which is mostly a residential area of three story town houses most of which were white and very nicely maintained. Our room at the hotel would not be ready until 11 AM so we dropped our luggage there and walked over to the Parliament Building. One note about London: it is a general rule that streets do not run in straight lines and it is only by accident if a street goes straight for more than a couple hundred feet. The street grid is more like a random mosaic that any regular grid. One nice help for tourists is that “Look Right” or “Look Left” is stenciled on the pavement at every corner since most tourists are in the habit of looking the wrong way for traffic. At the little park next to Parliament, we took some pictures of the Thames River, Parliament buildings, a sculpture called the Burghers of Calais and Westminster Abbey and walked back to the hotel. Our hotel room was small but inexpensive for London. The cost was about $150/night including breakfast but that is very cheap especially since we were within a mile of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and several museums. Twin brothers owned the hotel and they were very nice and everything was very clean. They started the hotel 41 years ago. As far as we could tell, one of the owners had a Portuguese wife who was much younger. They had three kids about 7, 10 and 13 years or so old. We would see them on school mornings in their navy blue school uniforms as they went off to school. The hotel is kind of a boutique hotel or large B&B since there are only about 20 rooms or so. Breakfast was a fried or soft boiled egg, bacon, baked beans or yogurt, toast, juice and coffee (instant) or tea. We rested a couple of hours in our room since we had been up for about 26 hours. Then we walked northwest of our hotel up to Harrods department store after stopping at the Victoria Station shopping mall. The area was mostly nice residential areas again with some shops, several parks and also an area of embassies.
Harrods Department store certainly meets all the hype one hears about it. It was a fantastic shopper's paradise but frustratingly crowded. It was huge, occupying a city block and having 7 floors. The 5 food courts were phenomenal with each one having a specialty: confections/tea/coffee, meats, fruits & vegetables, cheese, and bakery.. It is pricey though. The cheapest pair of women’s shoes was about $75 and the art department had many $10,000 plus items. Harrods also has an interior escalator shaft called the Egyptian escalator and there are open windows overlooking it. An opera singer was singing from one of the windows. From Harrods we walked up the street a little to look at all the shopping and then returned to the hotel. We did stop at a Tescos around the corner from the hotel in early evening to get some yogurt and snacks and found they had dark chocolate Kit Kat bars so we went there about three times.
On Saturday, we walked over to get tickets for the 9 AM tour of Parliament. The tour was of course very interesting and we had a great guide, Isabel. She was a volunteer but very knowledgeable. We had a small group of 10 and she kept emphasizing not to use cell phones or take pictures or wander off since that gets security very excited. The highlight was of seeing the House of Lords and House of Commons and learning some of the traditions that go back hundreds of years. Some make no sense now but had great symbolism when they originated. We were also impressed by some huge paintings of the Napoleonic wars. Unfortunately they have faded so much that they look drab but earlier restoration attempts have made it impossible to try again. From Parliament we walked up the street a little ways to take pictures of Big Ben and then went across the street to Westminster Abbey which again is so full of history. We did the self-guided tour with the hand held audio guides. We didn’t realize how many notable people were buried in the Abbey including Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and many more including many writers and kings. Very awe inspiring. Interestingly, there is a memorial to one Robinson' in the Abbey and another Robinson is buried there (no Gayers) - probably no relation:
* Memorial: Sir Thomas Robinson (d1777 at age 76) - architect and Member of Parliament
* Buried in the Abbey: Sir Lumley Robinson (d1684 at age 36) - Baronet of Kentwell Hall (Son of Thomas Robinson but no relationship to the one above)
From Westminster Abbey we walked up Whitehall street and past the entrance to Downing Street. You can’t walk down the street and past No. 10 Downing Street any longer. There is a big iron gate and guard house at the street entrance and a couple of guards in black carrying very visible machine guns. We took some pictures and walked up to Trafalgar Square that has a monument to Lord Nelson, the hero of the battle of Trafalgar. On the north side is the National Gallery. Entrance is free and our London Pass got us the hand-held audio guides for no additional charge. Fortunately, all the museums and art galleries are free and many of them have free guided tours. However, there are entrance fees to Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and the London Tower with the latter also covered by our London Pass. We were overwhelmed by the size of the collections at all the museums we visited which included the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the British Museum. One could easily spend a day at each whereas we only spent about three hours at each. The National Gallery had so many paintings that we only tried to see a suggested 100. Regrettably our understanding of art limits our appreciation. We did grab a sandwich and slice of apple pie in the cafeteria which again was very crowded. As we left the museum there was a street juggler entertaining a crowd below the entrance porch and stairs of the museum. Looking out over Trafalgar Square from the museum we could also see hundreds of people in Santa Claus costumes that had congregated around the Lord Nelson’s monument just to have fun and celebrate the season. The organizers called it a “flash mob.” We headed back from the National Gallery and found a nice bakery called Stiles that we visited about three times. They had great pastry and it was inexpensive. We had an apple turnover and roll for $3.00. One day we got there about 5:30 PM and they were trying to sell their inventory for the day so we got everything for $1.56 (£1). To finish out Saturday we ate at a British Pub just up the street. A pint of Guinness always tastes good at a pub. We both had the smoked salmon which was also good.
Sunday we walked up to Harrods again since they opened at 10:30 AM. We thought Harrods would be less crowded Suncay morning but it was still crowded so we walked over to the Victoria and Albert museum. Of course we had to stop to get a pastry at Valerie’s patisserie on Brompton Road. The Victoria and Albert museum had an interesting and beautiful collection of medieval and renaissance architectural facades and lots of statues. They also had two huge rooms of castings of Roman, Greek and other ancient architecture. Many were quite large like Trajans Column which is 125 ft high and 11 ft in diameter although they had it in two pieces. Some of the original architecture in Italy, Greece, etc. has deteriorated since when the castings were taken such that the castings now provide better information than the originals. The museum also had some very interesting collections. One room had a terrific jewelry collection; another room was full of nothing but lace in pull out vertical trays. They also had a huge room of incredible old tapestries. From the Victoria and Albert we walked to the Science Museum which is a fun museum. On the way we did walk past the side of the Natural History Museum. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to go in but we did admire the ice rink in front of the museum on one side. They also had several large trees nicely decorated with lights. The highlights of the Science Museum were the model ships, a collection of old machines, tools, trains, engines, computers, the remains of Crick and Watson’s model of the DNA molecule, and much more. One really neat exhibit was a globe about 10 ft in diameter upon which was projected demonstrations of weather, ocean currents, and civilization’s lights seen from space at night. There was also a huge vertical metal ring about 50 ft in diameter with a light show on the inside rim of the ring that would just have text that would bounce around and break up and act like they were influenced by gravity. From the Science Museum we walked back to Harrods to buy some gifts and take some photos at night of the beautifully lit exterior of Harrods, and then walked back to the hotel.
For Monday we went up to the underground station at Victoria Station and bought passes for about $9 that let us take the subway/underground all day as long we didn’t go too far away from central London. We took the underground over to the Tower of London. The Tower is next to the iconic Tower Bridge and so we got some photos of it. The Tower of London is really a collection of building inside old fortress walls. Of course the highlight was seeing the crown jewels. These jewels are just those used in the current and past coronation ceremonies and include several crowns and maces. There weren’t as many as we thought there would be and there isn’t much jewelry so it was a bit of a disappointment. But we did see where the two boy princes were held prisoner and presumably murdered on orders of Richard III. From the Tower we walked to St. Paul’s Cathedral which definitely was worth the visit. It was beautiful with incredible mosaics over the nave and black and white paintings on the dome. We walked up the couple hundred stairs to the walkway around the interior periphery of the dome and also went down to the crypt to see the coffins of Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington. We also learned that the word nave comes from the term for ship, like naval, because the nave is a barrel arch and looks like a ship hull upside down. We walked back to the hotel from St. Paul’s and stumbled across the best book store we’ve ever been in. It is called Foleys and is huge with about four floors of books. They had a fantastic collection of science, engineering and math books. That evening we ate at an Italian restaurant just up the block from the hotel. We both had the spaghetti and meatballs which was very good along with appetizers of a goat cheese crostini and pasta fagioli soup.
On Tuesday we decided to walk to the British Museum but walked past Buckingham Palace on the way to the museum. Unfortunately, there aren’t any tours during most of the winter. We also stopped at Fortnum and Mason which is another very upscale store selling mostly household items. All the clerks had on cut-away tuxedos. We wanted to go to the British Museum in order to see the reading room where Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin spent time, the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles and the Rhind Papyrus which dates from around 1650 B.C. and shows some Egyptian mathematics. Regrettably the Rhind Papyrus was not available and the reading room was undergoing renovation. The British Museum is also where part of the Mummy II was filmed. They have done a nice job of patching the holes where the mummies burst through the exterior walls of the museum;-) Seeing the Rosetta stone and learning some of its history was the highlight. Apparently it was part of an Egyptian temple but the temple was demolished when Egypt became Christian and the Rosetta Stone itself was incorporated in a fortress in the 15th century. The stone is not complete and so there are still parts out there somewhere in Egypt. Napoleon’s soldiers discovered the stone in 1799 and it then passed to the British upon the defeat of the French in Egypt.. On the way back to the hotel we walked past the Horse Guards parade ground and saw a herd of Santa Clauses on bicycles. There was about 40 of them plus two people in reindeer costumes that tried to stay in front. They were just bicycling around in a big oval and having fun. We didn’t do anything exciting Wednesday evening except to pack and get ready to leave at 8 AM the next morning.
Overall we did a lot of walking – over 8 miles every day. We did manage to avoid the student demonstrations about the tripling of tuition although we saw plenty of police. We were also in London when Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla were accosted by a crowd in their car. That was a big deal and the head of security offered to resign. Charles and Camilla were not in an armored car but they were in an area far away from Parliament and the sites of previous demonstrations and the street had been checked out a ½ hour before. We did walk past Scotland Yard and the building was surrounded by barriers and police with about one policeman every 20 feet plus there were dozens of vans of police parked on the side streets in case of trouble. We learned a new term: “kettling” which refers to police using barricades and police lines to try to funnel and control the demonstrators. We did see one unrelated demonstration on Saturday, Dec. 11. A small group of people were walking up the street outside of parliament with a heavy police escort in a demonstration against having any sharia law in Britain and against immigration. We saw a lot of people of African, Middle East, Indian/Pakistani, and Asian extraction. And everywhere we went seemed crowded and we heard a lot of French, German and Italian. We thought there wouldn’t be too many tourists in December but there were actually a lot. We would like to return to London in the summer sometime. There is so much we haven’t seen or done including the Natural History Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the two Tate Galleries, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, Buckingham Palace, shopping on Oxford Street, a boat ride down the Thames, day trips to Paris and Stonehedge and much more.
We worried about whether we could get back to the U.S. due to weather problems in the U.S. and Britain. But we did in fact make it back safely Wednesday night, Dec. 16 about three hours later than we were supposed to. We were originally scheduled to go through Atlanta but Delta cancelled that flight "due to ice" and we went through Minneapolis instead. Who would have thought? The flight over to London was half full but the flight to Minneapolis from London was packed so Delta probably made money on cancelling the Atlanta flight. We did have to wait about 3 hours in lines between getting our revised tickets and then checking in. But we did talk with the gentleman in front of us who was French but was working for International Rectifier Corporation in Austin, Texas. Janis teased him that he knew how to speak French, German, English, and Texan. He also said that the semi-conductor business was still not very good, and observed that the U.S. was much more harsh and cold in dealing with laying off people. Europe has many laws that require much more more notice than the U.S. gives. It has both good and bad aspects. Glad we got out of London when we did. They are having more weather problems in Britain with many cancelled flights due to cold weather and snow. Northern Ireland is having the worst winter in 25 years. The trickiest part was getting home from McGhee-Tyson airport at 11:30 PM since there was light snow if Knoxville that had left a layer of slush and ice on the roads.
