Our first week in London has been easygoing and fun. We slowed down a bit from our intensive touring in Rome, and settled in for a month-long stay. We wanted this to be like the month we spent living close to Central Park in New York, when we really got to know the city, so that we always feel at home when we return. Similarly, we already feel very comfortable here in London!
So far, we’ve visited the British Museum (which I wrote about previously) and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (which I’ll write about tomorrow). We’ve visited two art museums (Tate Modern and National Portrait Gallery) and Westminster Abbey. We toured two small house museums, one dedicated to the great writer, Charles Dickens, whose books both Miss C and I enjoy, and one dedicated to the fictional character, Sherlock Holmes. And we’ve thoroughly explored two of the storied parks here, Regents Park and St. James Park, and spent time hanging out in beautiful Trafalgar Square.
But mostly we’ve just been getting to know the city. We got “Oyster passes” our first day, and have used them to take the tube (London’s subway system) all over the place. These passes are electronic cards tied to accounts to which you can add money. You just press the card against a reader as you pass through a turnstile to enter the tube (they also work for buses). At the end of the day, the fees for all your travels are deducted from your balance. A nice, easy-to-use system! The London tube system is extensive, and you can get just about anywhere in the city with a change from one line to another.
We’ve also been walking a lot, although so far, not as much as we did in Spain and Italy! Walking and taking the side streets is such a great way to get to know a European city (I qualify that with “European” because even in cities, we Americans tend toward sprawl). Luckily, we have a London map book with two-page spreads of different neighborhoods, so I don’t have to keep folding up a larger map, eventually ripping it apart like I did with Madrid’s.
We are staying in an apartment that’s a block away from a tube station, and there’s a coop grocery store with healthy food just one more block away. It’s great to be able to make our own food, especially for breakfast, but we’ve also been sampling the wonderful restaurants here. We’ve enjoyed some delicious pub food and really loved a Greek restaurant near the Globe — we’ll be taking my husband Neil there this evening, after he arrives to join us for a week! We also love that we can get sandwiches and anything else we want, any time we want. And we can have protein for breakfast! This is such a relief after Italy and especially Spain, which have very specific and limited hours that restaurants are open, and where people don’t seem to want anything more than a croissant for breakfast. This is so restrictive to us Californians, used to being able to eat throughout the day, whenever we are hungry, and to eat a good breakfast and lots of fruit and veggies!
A book on Miró's work complements the Tate retrospective
In another connection with an earlier part of our trip, we really enjoyed the special Miró exhibit at the Tate Modern. Joan Miró was Catalan, and there is a museum named for him in Barcelona, but we didn’t have a chance to tour it. It was wonderful, then, to see a large retrospective of his work at the Tate. I don’t see how one could fully appreciate it, though, without knowing something of modern Spanish history and the Catalan independence movement. Having been in Barcelona, and having toured one of its city history museums, we could understand a little better Miró’s bitterness about Franco’s dictatorship, expressed through his art. Like Picasso, he was a classically trained artist who produced more conventional works at the beginning of his career, but who evolved into an innovative surrealist painter with a unique, recognizable style (a book featuring work from the exhibit is available).
The National Portrait Gallery is a completely different kind of art museum. As we toured a room of Tudor portraits, Miss C said to me, “This is really about the history more than the art, isn’t it?” There was a lot of history indeed, not only through paintings of British monarchs and other key political figures, but we also really enjoyed the rooms dedicated to artists and scientists in British history. Together were three portraits — geologist Charles Lyell (whose work profoundly influenced Charles Darwin), Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s bulldog,” who defended Darwin’s ideas in scientific meetings), and Charles Darwin himself. It was profound to look at them closely. Miss C enjoyed the portraits of Gilbert and Sullivan and an accompanying retrospective of their work. After viewing a few centuries’ worth of such portraits over two separate visits, we went down to the bookshop gallery to see “Mick Jagger: Young in the Sixties.” Talk about variety. Amazingly, they didn’t prohibit cameras, so I was able to photograph a unique portrait of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte painted by their brother Branwell, found folded up on top of a cabinet.
The connections continued when we visited Westminster Abbey. There, as I posted earlier on Facebook, I was moved to tears when I saw a small plaque dedicated to the Bronte sisters, just to the right of a much larger statue memorial to William Shakespeare. These and other memorials are part of “Poets’ Corner,” a section of the cathedral where many of Britain’s most prestigious literary lights are buried, or at least memorialized (some are buried elsewhere, as is Shakespeare).
Without a doubt, the famous burials at Westminster Abbey draw many visits to this beautiful cathedral, which was Catholic for 600 years, until Henry VIII broke with the Pope and declared himself head of the Church of England. So it has the look of a Catholic cathedral. But it is much more than a church; it is the site of coronation of every English monarch since 1066. It’s also the site of royal weddings, including the recent one of Prince William and Kate Middleton (and yes, there was a photo exhibit of that wedding, now part of British history, in one of the medieval chapels).
I’ve always been fascinated by Tudor history, so I loved seeing the tomb of Elizabeth I, and I appreciated the irony that her sister Mary, her Catholic rival and predecessor as Queen, is buried underneath her in the same tomb. Another irony was that James I had an equally grand tomb built for his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had executed as a traitor, in the same position as Elizabeth’s tomb, on the opposite side of Henry VII’s chapel.
It was touching to see the Grave of the Unknown Warrior, which still had a wreath in front of it with a small American flag, laid there the previous day by President Obama. It is a tradition that American presidents visit this memorial, which honors all soldiers killed in war, in solidarity with our great allies, the British.
Please see our photos of Regents Park and of our forays around London this past week to share it with us a little!
