I felt awful last night, and I felt pretty bad most of today, but now I think I shall write something. I already have loads of stuff I'm putting off talking about, after all!

Yesterday I went to London. Just in case some people are confused, that's London England, the capital city. Someone seemed to think I meant London somewhere else. Odd.

So, I went to London with three other people from work. We'd decided to test this book from work - a curious London walks book. We do all sorts of things together. They're mad. In a nice way. :-)

We travelled up on the Fenchurch Street line, which goes past Hadleigh castle and lots of picturesque seaside gubbins. It took about an hour to get to London as it was a slower train - one that called at lots of stations.

The first walk we did was a Great Fire of London walk. It started at the Monument (designed by Christopher Wren), which is massive! I'm probably stupid but I hadn't realised that was why Monument Underground station was called Monument. Heh. It's 202 feet high, which is the distance between it and the place in Pudding Lane where the fire began. The huge Doric column has has 311 very tiring steps inside it! But the view from the top is fantastic. You can see for miles across London. It was built between 1671 and 1677 to commemorate the Great Fire and also to celebrate the city's rebuilding. That fire had burned for three days in September 1666, and led to Christopher Wren being an extremely busy fellow...

From there we walked down to Pudding Lane itself, and investigated various buildings that had been rebuilt after the Great Fire. Most of them were designed by Christopher Wren. How on Earth did he have time to do all that stuff? Or did he just order people around and put his name to things? I don't know. The tour was basically of lots of old pubs and churches. One of the churches was St Clements, and claimed to be the church mentioned in the "Oranges and Lemons" rhyme. There are so many little alleys in London that lead to buildings straight out of Dickens. Or they claim to be, anyway! It's incredible to think that so much has survived. And even more incredible to think that no-one really ever sees it...

I particularly liked the "George and Vulture" pub, which has to be seen to be believed. I also saw the site of the first coffee house in London, a building that has two mice and a piece of cheese sculpted onto its side (a builder had his lunch eaten by some mice and got the plasterer to immortalise the moment), and loads more things, before ending up back at the Monument.

From there we walked across the river (on a bridge, obviously) and paid a quick visit to the Globe Theatre. Now that's a pretty impressive piece of reconstruction work. We didn't see inside the theatre, and we didn't go on a tour, but we had a cup of coffee there! And it's only £5 to see some Shakespeare performed there, which might be fun.

We ate our lunch outside the Tate Modern, with a rather nice view of the Millennium Bridge and St Paul's Cathedral (a more famous Wren building!). After eating everything we had a quick look inside the Tate. Some things that are considered art are veeerrry strange. There was only one lot of stuff I liked the look of, and that was pop art type stuff. Mostly weeiiiird.

And then we walked across the wobbly bridge (except it's not wobbly anymore - they had to close it soon after it opened since it made people sick) straight up to St Paul's! I'm not sure what I expected St Paul's to be like. It's very big. And needs cleaning. And there were some office blocks being put up right next to it that claimed "finally Wren's great building gets the surroundings it deserves". I doubt that, personally.

A little further on we popped into a bookshop where the owner (rather hilariously) thought that Cheryl (who we'd put in charge of the expedition) was a real tour leader! Once outside again, the next walk began outside the central criminal courts. Now that is an impressive piece of fairytale architecture.

Near to that is another St Clements, and although it doesn't state on a sign (like the other St Clements did) that it's the church featured in the rhyme, I think it's more likely to be the one. It's a fantastic church - the Royal Air Force's church. St Clement Danes. It was designed by (you guessed it) Wren, although it had to be reconstructed after being mostly destroyed in the Blitz. The floor is covered in Welsh slate plaques with different Air Force badges. There are so many! Over 800, in fact. It's a beautiful church. And every few hours the bells play "Oranges and Lemons". Hooray!

We went down the side streets again after that. Past the London School of Economics, paying a quick visit to the Old Curiosity Shop. (Yet another building that claims to be the one featured in Dickens's novels.) We walked all around Lincoln's Inn Fields, admiring all the huge houses that were once lived in by famous people. I think they're mostly offices now. The Ship Tavern is hiding down a little road - apparently it was a good place to hold secret Catholic services!

Lincoln's Inn Fields also harbours the most amazing little museum I've ever seen! It's the house of Sir John Soanes. When he died he left all his collections behind, and his house is full of the most amazing stuff! Original paintings by famous artists like Hogarth, antiquities like Pharoah Seti I's sarcophagus... there's just stuff everywhere! Loads of the rooms have walls completely covered in fragments of Greek and Roman masonry. But the stuff packed in there... it's like some sort of magnificient Tardis.

On our way back to where the walk started, we passed some buses and various other vehicles that were connected to the filming of Dirty Pretty Things. Not something I'd heard of, and there was no activity anywhere, but still.

When that walk was over we headed in the general direction of Covent Garden. We had a look round the London Theatre Museum, since we were walking past it and it was, erm, free. Not all that exciting, but they did have some cheap Farscape bookmarks. (I was thinking I'd sell them on eBay. *g*)

Eventually we got to Covent Garden and saw the usual peculiar street performers. One guy's act involved him balancing a football on various parts of his body whilst taking his t-shirt on and off. Amongst other things. And there was an interesting group of musicians dressed as a guitar playing wolf (I think), a double bass playing pig and a drumming kangaroo. With cigarettes in his pouch. LOL!

After having a rather windswept cup of coffee we strolled into theatre land. Bright lights everywhere advertising various productions, not all of which I'd heard of. Not that I'm into that sort of thing much. We wandered around there for ages before hopping on the Tube to get back to the railway station. Although once there we detoured to St Katharine's Dock (some mighty posh boats moored there, I can tell you!). And we got a closer look at Tower Bridge while we were there.

If you go to the right places, London needn't be the noisy, dirty place you might imagine it to be. It's full of so many interesting things. It's such an amazing mixture of old and new. You look at the skyline and it's old things, new things and things under construction. Or cranes. Lots of cranes. It's a constantly changing environment. Anyway, I really enjoyed myself, and that was with a persistent headache!

That's about it. I missed out loads of stuff though. And I can't even remember a lot of the stuff we saw. An overwhelming amount of information to take in. Fun though. ;-)

And wow, there are a lot of Starbucks. *sigh*

posted by Fiery Fred @ 9:14 PM