Tuesday 29 October 2013
Saturday 19 October 2013
Sunday 13 October 2013
LONDON
5th - 12th August 2013
DAY 1
DAY 1
MONDAY
Pembury Hotel, Seven Sisters Road,
Finsbury Park, North London.
Our favourite little cafe down the road from the hotel;
good coffee, decent sausage & chips, good people watching.
After confinement to the hotel for an hour by a downpour,
we hit the streets.
Trafalgar Square.
Statue of George IV and Steeple of
St.Martin-in-the-Fields.
First Sight of Big Ben.
On Nelson's Column.
Current occupant of the fourth plinth,
Katherina Fritsch's 'Hahn/Cock'.
From Trafalgar Square we walked under Admiralty Arch
and along The Mall to Buckingham Palace.
The Victoria Monument.
George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother).
Bronze relief of George VI and Elizabeth meeting
London citizens during the Blitz.
Statue of Eros, Piccadilly Circus.
DAY 2
TUESDAY
Foyles Bookshop, where I worked for a year after graduation from UCL in 2000.
The four windows on the corner of the first floor contained my Sociology department.
Nelson's Column, Trafalgar Square -
in the sunshine this time!
The Elizabeth Tower,
formerly the Westminster Clock Tower,
A.K.A. Big Ben.
The Houses of Parliament.
Oliver Cromwell.
Across Westminster Bridge to the South Bank of the Thames,
we board the London Eye.
Statue of Laurence Olivier,
outside the National Theatre, South Bank.
Crossing back to the north side on the Millennium Footbridge.
St. Paul's Cathedral.
Thomas Beckett sculpture,
St. Paul's Cathedral Gardens.
My favourite character from history.
Never be afraid to speak your mind.
Statue of G.R.Heeley, St. Paul's Cathedral Gardens.
George had a wee behind those bushes -
don't tell the Bishop of London.
Queen Anne.
I've always found her one of the most quietly interesting royals.
A coffee for Dad and a lemonade for George in a city coffee house,
before heading back to the hotel and a long play in Finsbury Park.
DAY 3
WEDNESDAY
'Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward.'
University College London, my old Alma Mater.
I studied Philosophy here 1997-2000.
The Department of Philosophy,
19 Gordon Square,
in beautiful Bloomsbury.
Warning: studying here may leave you with an ever so slightly demented appearance.
Philosophy Department rear entrance.
Many cigarettes smoked here, quite a lot of wine drunk,
and many of Dr.Tim Crane's impressions of his colleagues enjoyed.
Levitating creature, Covent Garden.
Lego royals, Hamleys Toyshop, Regent Street.
'Still Water', Nic Fiddian-Green's
enormous sculpture just beside Marble Arch.
Reformer's Tree Memorial, Hyde Park.
Crossing the Serpentine Bridge, which marks the boundary
between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.
'A symbol of that restless physical impulse to seek
the still unachieved in the domain of material things.'
Monument to Physical Energy, G.F.Watts,
Kensington Gardens.
Princess Diana Memorial Playground, Kensington Gardens.
The playground to end all playgrounds, I thought;
George, however, voted it his all-time number two playground after Finsbury Park.
He is evidently a man of the people.
Queen Victoria and Kensington Palace.
The Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens.
The Royal Albert Hall,
and sundown.
DAY 4
THURSDAY
To London Zoo!
On the tube - which, as you can see, is a serious business.
Indeed.
Take that, creationism!
Okapi.
Giant pirhana.
Monkeys!
Some of the birds flying around you in the Blackburn Pavilion
are extinct out in the wild. Pretty humbling.
Pygmy hippopotami.
George and sleeping aardvarks.
Down in the tubestation at teatime.
DAY 5
FRIDAY
To Kew Gardens!
Kew had a theme running this year: IncrEdible Plants;
hence this giant pineapple in the centre of the boating lake,
above the mysterious secret banana grotto...
In the Palm House. The lesser-spotted beanpole on the right
is my good friend from UCL days, Steve Jones, who took time out
from being a Whitehall mandarin to come and hang out with us.
View of the Glasshouse from the Treetop Walkway.
George giving Steve and fellow visitors to the eighteen-metre high
walkway the jitters by testing the mesh flooring with a
good deal of jumping up and down and running around like a madman.
Japanese Gateway.
The Pagoda,
erected 1762.
Steve bid us farewell after lunch to search for a magic ring.
A week or two later he would propose to his Claire on a hill
overlooking Paris, and she would say yes.
Well done, sir!
Kew Palace.
One of Kew's 'Old Lions',
the Pagoda Tree,
planted here in 1760 from Japan.
George and friends playing 'This Is My Carrot!'
The girl in blue had to be physically peeled off George later,
and really wanted him to go to her party.
In the banana grotto, only reachable by rowing boat.
The mysterious secret is that it smells of bananas.
In the pumpkin patches of the Pumpkin Parade.
DAY 6
SATURDAY
The Natural History Museum, South Kensington.
A first for both of us.
Main Hall, containing twenty-six metre long cast
of Dippy the Diplodocus.
George and a sixty-five million year old (at least) Triceratops.
You don't see one of those every day.
A section of trunk from a Giant Sequoia of North America.
It was around 1300 years old when it was felled.
Dodo.
'Sensational Butterflies' exhibit.
Back to Kensington Gardens. This is the Elfin Oak,
a nine-hundred year old tree stump carved and painted with elves,
gnomes and animals by Ivor Innes.
Princess Diana Memorial Playground (again).
Statue of Peter Pan.
Erected overnight on 30th April 1912 as a Mayday surprise
from J.M.Barrie to the children of London.
The Italian Gardens.
Kensington Gardens is a magical place.
DAY 7
SUNDAY
The Tower of London.
The things this building has seen in its nine and a half centuries...
Entrance to St.Thomas's Tower, A.K.A. the Traitor's Gate.
Ann Boleyn, Thomas More and Catherine Howard
were all brought into the Tower by this gate.
Mortars from the 17th (right) and 18th (left) century.
Trajan, Emperor of the Roman Empire from 98 to 117 AD.
Behind him and his friend is the old London Wall.
George is sat on remains of the original wall built by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago.
The higher part behind him is the remains of the rebuilt wall from the Middle Ages.
Tower Bridge.
Much of the steel used in the bridge is from Teesside.
'The Navigators' sculpture by David Kemp,
Hay's Galleria, Southwark.
On London Bridge.
The first London Bridge stood here circa 50 AD.
Crossing it was a good way to say farewell to the city.
George tossed a coin from it and made a secret wish.
From Monument Station we took the tube north to Wood Green,
which was my home for nearly four years, and climbed
up the hill to Alexandra Palace to have a picnic overlooking London.
George played for a while in a playground on the way back down,
before tea in our little cafe on Seven Sisters Road.
Next morning we spent a few hours in Finsbury Park,
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