Friday - Sunday, September 22 -  24

 

London weekend.

Friday

Having been on the go all the past weekend in Scotland, the week flew by.  By Friday, we seemed to just naturally fall into a weekend in the city, rather than trying to go somewhere else.  It was also a great weekend to spend in London since Saturday and Sunday were the days on which the once-a-year London Open House occurred for this year.  On these days, buildings, churches, homes, museums, etc. are listed in a pamphlet and open free of charge for visitors.  There must be 300 - 400 sites listed, ranging from a closed tube station from Victorian times to a circus school.

On Friday, we made our way at mid-day down to the Moorgate tube station.  We had been told that just around the corner, between the hours of ~10:00 - 2:00, a man sold travel books at 30 - 40% off.  It took us 10 -15 minutes to find his tables set up along a side street beside the upscale Marks & Spencer department store, but he did have a great collection of cheap books.  We bought four Lonely Planet books, our favorite travel series, and a great little pocket book of maps of London.  We then set off for the Barbican for lunch.  

Just beside the Moorgate tube station, there is a staircase that takes you up to the second floor.  There a path begins that wanders a quarter-mile across various terraces, under buildings raised on stilts, across walkways, etc., meandering above and among the cityscape just like a woodland path would in a country landscape.  A good part of it is next to or just under several large blocks of apartments, 8 - 10 stories high.  As you walk along, you look down on a very large pool of water -- an urban lake, really -- that these apartments face.  Each apartment has a long balcony and the balconies are lined with flower boxes.  A profusion of green and flowers hangs from them, making the whole scene feel much more natural and lived-in than it would otherwise.  I was reminded of science fiction pictures I've seen that project future cities to be tall, layered buildings of terraces with hanging gardens.

The cafe we ended up at, after crossing the "lake" on a raised walkway, was at the Barbican Center, the main performing arts complex in London where we had seen the Goldsworthy exhibit.  It was a warm, sunny day, so we were able to eat on the terrace beside the water.  Food was not exceptional. but you couldn't beat the ambiance!

After lunch, C. went back to M&S to shop and I headed in the opposite direction to look for the "rooms" of the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society.  There was another, similar quarter-mile raised path that ended at the Barbican tube station.  I continued walking beside the station and soon found myself on Smithfield Street.  On my left was a three-block long building -- really a succession of relatively low (30' high) buildings that were all connected to one another, some times with a street cutting through the middle.  There you could see that they were supported by metal gingerbread braces and structures, all painted in various "new age Victorian" colors, such as aqua, maroon, beige, and black.  It turns out this is the main wholesale food district of London.  You pass stall after stall with incredible meats displayed, including those mammoth hunks of prime rib that probably weigh 20 pounds or more.  I tell you, it makes you want to be a full-fledge carnivore again.

After wandering around a bit, I found the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society.  It's on a small, old street (Greville), over a pub, and entered from a locked door off a side alley.  Once you buzz them, announce your presence, and get let in, you go up a modern, open, light wood staircase that ends in a large living room with comfortable chairs and sofas, current newspapers and magazines, even a fireplace. Across one wall is a small bar behind which are lined 200 or so identical bottles of the various scotches that have been bottled by the society over the last who-knows-how-many years.  Each is identified only by a small notation of the number assigned to that particular cask.  I was very cordially received by "Richard"  and served a small nip of a Speyside he recommended.  It was quite good, and afterwards, I made my way back to Moorgate to meet C, this time by the tube which was only a block away.

After linking up with C.,  we walked up to another neighborhood to scout out a theater that was showing a movie that we wanted to see.  After finding the theater and learning that there was no afternoon matinee, we walked over to the tube and started home.  We parted paths along the way, C. going on home and me back to Leicester Square to the half-price ticket office to see if we could get tickets for that night's performance of Copenhagen.

Copenhagen, which we saw that night at a theater in Covent Garden, is based on the lives of Niels Bohr and Robert Heisenberg, two of the giants of theoretical physics in the first half of the twentieth century.  The play is set in Bohr's home and also includes his wife as a personal and social commentator.  The whole play is based on the "mystery" of why the visit took place, since both men were Jews, former mentor and student, but Heisenberg had been working on a Nazi atomic project, and hence they were estranged.  Since Heisenberg is best known for a principle called uncertainty -- by which one is limited in the accuracy with which one can know both the location and the momentum of a particle at the same time -- and since the play was about moral and personal uncertainty, the two notions of uncertainty supplied lots of thematic interconnections between their respective work, lives, moral and ethical behavior. I enjoyed the play, but felt I would need to read it to get a really clear sense of it.

Saturday

Saturday and Sunday were mostly concerned with going to several sites/events included in the London Open House. The first was "The Geology of St. Paul's Precinct," but mostly concerned with the cathedral.  It was led by Eric Robinson, a geologist from University College London.  We met at the West Portico, the main entrance to St. Paul's and spent more than an hour there.  Eric explained the five major kinds of stone found in the area, and then made that point that one could study geology not by going into the countryside but by examining pieces of it used in the buildings of of the city.  The main outside structure of St. Paul's, for example, is made of Portland Limestone, a stone of highly compressed seashells found on an island off the south-west coast of England.  On the side of the building you could see bits of shell, including the edges of whole oyster shells, just emerging from the stone where the outer few millimeters had been eaten away over the centuries.  You could also see the lines where the ancient sea bed had lain, sometimes running horizontally in individual pieces of stone, but also vertically if the stone had been rotated before shaping.  

We also saw examples of granite that had, when still molten, flowed in and around structures of slate. Sometimes pieces of that surrounding matrix had been broken off and embedded in the molten granite, in which case these so-called "heathens" -- appearing as black masses within the otherwise gray or red granite -- had had their edges melted smooth.  Most of the granite appeared as either paving stones or as small vertical stanchions that lined driving areas and kept carriages then/cars now from coming up on walking areas.

In some more recent buildings, we saw Portland Limestone from a layer that occurs higher in the quarry and, hence, was less compressed than the limestone used in the older buildings.  It was extremely porous in its outer surface, like a large-pored sponge.  The shells were largely intact, cemented together but with large gaps between.  It made a very interesting textured exterior, but would not have been suitable for carving or for structure (it's used only as a surface skin).

After spending two hours on our feet walking around St. Paul's, we stopped in a small open-air cafe just opposite the west portico and had a coffee.  From there, we wandered down a couple of blocks and turned up "Old Bailey St."  We expected to see Rumpole come ambling by any minute, but since it was Saturday and court was not in session, we didn't.  We did see several interesting buildings along the street that used mixtures of brown and black granites in very interesting ways.  After passing a large hospital, we could see a throng of dressed up people coming out of a courtyard from a church tucked back in.  They were all coming from what appeared to be a pretty up-scale wedding.  We stood across the street for a while and watched.  We were particularly intrigued by all the women who had large, colorful, and classically English hats.  Some still wore them, especially the older women, but many carried them, particularly the younger ones, like men who can't wait to take their jackets or ties off after such an occasion.

We cut through Smithfield Market, marveled at the ironwork, and headed up to the rooms of the Scotch Malt Whiskey Society so that I could show C. their location.  We also tried to find a restaurant for supper in this area.  I had seen lots of interesting little ones with outside tables on Friday, but with the market closed on Saturday, so were they.  We gave up after a while and decided to hop a tube up to Camden Town and eat at a brasserie that had caught our eye.  Unfortunately, the one we wanted to try didn't open until six and since we wanted to go to a movie in a different part of town that started at seven, we looked for another place.  Ended  up in a basement organic food restaurant that was quite good.

That evening we went to see the movie, The Wind Will Carry Us.  It is a film shot in Iran by an Iranian director.  Only the main character was played by a professional actor; the rest were people that lived in the remote village where the film was set.  It was outstanding visually.  Beautiful rolling hills, fields of ripe wheat warmly golden in color, and a mountain village comprised of a maze of interconnected houses and alleys, all made from the same off-white, foot-thick adobe or mud.  The story was about a group of men, including the main character, sent from Tehran to this remote village to bury an old woman who was presumably dying but refused to do so.  It was very much a story of the outsider and his encounter with a traditional culture.  The main action involved his getting calls on his cell phone, jumping into his car, and driving hell-bent to the top of the hill near the cemetery so that he could get good enough reception to talk.

Sunday

We enjoyed the "urban geology" tour of St. Paul's so much on Saturday that we went downtown again Sunday morning for a similar tour, this time to Trafalgar Square, where we gathered on the portico of a much smaller church, St. Martin in the Field.  The same guide was there and he repeated a good deal of the basic information, pointing out the Portland stone, its fossils, looking at "heathens" in granite, this time in a drinking fountain, etc.  There was one new item, however.  Behind the church in a small, paved-with-stone walkway was a marble tribute to Oscar Wilde.  It was donated by a sculptor and included a larger-than-life head of Wilde that was bronze and looked as if were formed from various pieces of rope, with lots of open space.  It was placed at the head-end of what resembled a large, gray sarcophagus.  It tapered in width from head to foot, but the head one-third and the bottom one-sixth were both canted up at an angle, suggesting torso and feet but with nothing representational about them.  The stone was highly polished gray marble with lots of darker waves and ripples.  The guide said that the donor said the ripples suggested Wilde's "turbulent" life.  I don't know about that, but it was a beautiful piece of stone with a not very interesting bronze head stuck on it.

Since we had heard a good deal of the general information that was being noted in different buildings, we left the walk about half-way through, caught a bus up the Strand for a half-mile or so, and went to see an abandoned tube station, called Aldwych.  It was interesting in its use of tiles and the original wooden fixtures, such as elevator floor and ticket booth.  Also located in various rooms that you got to by wandering through a dark labyrinth of tunnels and passageways were various pieces of art on exhibit, called "Tunnel Vision."  Those clever Brits!  Most was pretty uninteresting, although the idea was.  The only one I liked was a darkened room in which little pieces of dark metal were placed on the floor in a vertical position.  Each had lots of little holes in them with colored lights behind.  The effect suggested looking down on a darkened cityscape.

After leaving the tube station, we went up to the London Transportation Museum, browsed through its bookstore enough to get a sense that the underground system is comprised of some six or eight different companies, each with its own history, reason for existing, trains, etc.  From there, we wandered through an indoor market, full of stalls of artsy/interesting upscale stuff, and ended up back at St. Martin just in time for lunch!  We ate in the "Crypt Cafe" located in the basement of the church.  It's a beautiful old space, with vaulted ceilings of ancient brick, a floor made from a mosaic of tombstones (we didn't ask what lay beneath), and a couple of shops.  The food wasn't very interesting, but one of the shops was.  It was dedicated to "rubbings," whereby one creates an impression of a surface, such as a tombstone or other carving, by putting a piece of paper over it and rubbing with a pencil.  Only, they had made a business out of it and greatly facilitated the process.  They had evidently gone around and made impressions of interesting images, ranging from six-inch unicorns to six-foot angels, then from those made flat brass reverse images (original raised lines become depressions in the new flat surface).  Then, if you wanted to make a rubbing, they would pull out the selected image/brass, tape paper over it, set you up at a table, , and provide you with a variety of crayons that seemed to derive their colors from embedded specks of metal.  You could then lightly bring the image into view and, afterwards, color the details more vigorously in the desired shades.  We didn't do one, but we know lots of folk who would like to if they ever come to London!

After lunch at the Crypt, we took the tube up to Belsize Park to visit an architect's flat that was on the Open House list.  It was raining, so C. decided to go home, while I trudge through the rain to the flat.  Outside was a line 50' long or more.  I waited a half-hour under my umbrella.  People in line were friendly, not complaining about either the rain or the wait, and generally enjoying talking with one another.  When we got to the door, we all had to take our shoes off and leave them in an enormous pile.  The flat very nicely done.  It was on three floors, beginning with the second, in an old town house.  The first contained a big kitchen, very spare and modern, and a medium-sized living room.  The second was all bedrooms, closed off from viewing.  The top was the master bedroom, a large bath, and a small balcony that overlooked a postage stamp garden in the back.  The most interesting thing about the flat, to me, was the use of materials.  The walls were all white with a soft, muted tan jute carpeting throughout.  The kitchen was a single wall of dark gray cupboards with a stainless steel counter surface that ran the length.  Overall, it was nice, but not to die for or for my £500,000!

After coming home and resting a bit, we went a couple of doors down to a "garden party" being given by our neighbor.  It was a cordial gathering of either people who lived nearby or people who had something to do with clinical psychology, which is our neighbor's profession.  Where our apartment has a small living room and that opens out onto a small terrace, this one opens out onto a small enclosed sunroom, giving it much more space and light, especially on a rainy day!  After several hours, lots of good conversation, and too much wine, we went home and so to bed.