Open House, Part 2

Well, mates, it's happened. I've run out of steam. I've just gotten in from my last day of adventures, and I am truly knackered. Thankfully, the blisters didn't start to appear until yesterday, and I had a pretty easy (right!) day planned for today. We had 11 index cards for the day, 10 of which were in the City and one in Tower Hamlets (just east of Tower Hill, where Whitechapel meets Wapping). We made it to 9 of the 11, plus one that wasn't on the original list:

• The Daily Express Building (or what was the Daily Express; not sure what's in the building now -- might be Goldman Sachs -- but it's still an Art Deco gem and we were able to see the lobby)
• Apothecaries' Hall (one of the best preserved 17c livery hall interiors; I took some pix of jars that held leeches and various herbs and potions)
• St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe (Wren's last church in the City)
  
• Painters' Hall (bombed in the war and rebuilt afterwards)
• St Helen Bishopsgate (parts date from 1210 and it survived the Great Fire)
• Bevis Marks Synagogue (built in 1701; it's the oldest synagogue in Britain)
• Old Turkish Baths (late Victorian; now a pizza parlor where we had a nice lunch)
• Guildhall (Grade I listed medieval civic building, dating from the 12th century)
• St Bartholomew's Hospital (founded in 1123; Grade I listed Georgian building where we saw the Great Hall and a staircase decorated with huge canvases by Wm. Hogarth)
• Wilton's Music Hall (dates from 1859; the oldest music hall in Britain and possibly in Europe; if you saw the movie Casandra's Dream, you caught some glimpses of the interior)

Spooner's favorite from today was the synagogue, while mine was Wilton's. I got some pix, but in many places you either aren't allowed to photograph or the lighting is so dim that it wasn't possible.

When we got back to Belsize Park, we went to Budgen's supermarket to get things for dinner and for our respective journeys (Spooner's with some kids from his school to Scotland tomorrow and mine home to the States). Oh joy, oh joy! HobNobs were on sale -- buy one package for 99p and get the second free. Brilliant!

Pedometer reading: 18,700 steps, 7.6 miles

Expenses:

• £5 for my half of our pizza at Ciro's
• £1 for a piece of cake at Wilton's (a bunch of oldies off a bus tour were having tea and cakes in the cafe and I grabbed a piece of ginger cake)
• 99p for two packages of HobNobs
• £9.49 for a bottle of wine for Spooner's household
  

I think I'm ok for money on my Oyster to get to Heathrow tomorrow. Spooner and his flatmates will be leaving before dawn for their school trips, and I'll leave the house around 10 for the long journey home. It's been a really wonderful trip -- I saw a few new areas as I fill in the map of London, I got to spend some time with Flickr mates -- new and old -- whose company I totally enjoy, I saw sites that a regular tourist rarely gets to see, and (I hope) I got a few good pix in the process. I'm especially happy that I got to spend a fair amount of time in the East End (Hoxton, Shoreditch, Spitalfields and Whitechapel) because I missed that patch on my last trip. Watch for the pix to appear on Flickr -- after I rest, play with the cats, and do a mountain of laundry.

Thanks for reading about my adventures. The next post will be from Stateside, when I will tell you all about conkers, snails, stinging nettles and dock. I'll also go back to my older posts and drop in photos and links.

Open House, Part 1

As we all could have predicted, I'd planned more than we could do on the Saturday of Open House Weekend. Way more. I had 15 index cards that I wrote out and sorted for Saturday -- we made it to 8 of the destinations. Here's a quick list of the places we hit:

• City Hall (where Boris presides over the Greater London Authority)
  
• [Borough Market -- Not an Open House destination, but we stopped here to get portable food to sustain us through the day]
• Allies and Morrison Studios (an architectural firm)
• Blue Fin Building (designed by Allies and Morrison; home of IPC Media)
  
• Kirkaldy Testing Works (Grade II listed industrial building, purpose-built to house D Kirkaldy's unique testing machine, now restored)
  
• Freemason's Hall (no photos allowed in this top secret place, but I just may have taken one when the poobahs weren't looking)
• St George's Bloomsbury (the last of Hawksmoor's six London churches, consecrated in 1730, recently restored)
  
• German Gymnasium in Pancras Road (1861, the first purpose-built gymnasium in Britain, now the King's Cross visitor centre)
  
• St Pancras Old Church (there's been a church on this site since the 4th century; the one there now has Norman and Victorian parts)
  

When I post the pix of all these things on Flickr, I'll fill in more of the details about each building. I think we had a good mix of historic and modern stuff.

That evening, we went to see a play at the New End Theatre up in Hampstead. I could hardly stay awake (but I did!).

Pedometer reading: 25,000 steps, 10.1 miles (I have blisters to prove it)

Expenses:

• £3 for a chicken & veg pasty and £2 for a brownie at Borough Market
• Another tenner to top up the Oyster card
  
• Spooner treated me to theatre
  

Graveyards and Graffiti

After three days of roaming on my own, it was great to have company for my explorations yesterday (Friday). I met my Flickrmate Maggie at the Angel bright and early, and we went by bus to Stoke Newington, a place neither of us had been. Our first stop was Abney Park Cemetery -- it's one of the Magnificent Seven (park-like, Victorian cemeteries around London that were modeled on the ones in Boston including Mount Auburn) and is the second of the seven that I've visited (Rosenbeans and I went to Highgate four years ago). Abney Park is the most derelict of the seven -- wildly overgrown, with tilted and toppling headstones, headless and armless angels, and a disused chapel. We had a bright, sunny day for our exploration, and so it wasn't as gloomy and atmospheric as I imagine it would be in the fog and mist. This cemetery is where dissenters (non-C of E people) were buried after Bunhill Fields filled up. The Victorians were really into death, and their monuments and ornamentation were quite over the top. Stay tuned for photos.

From there, we walked down Stoke Newington Church Street to Clissold Park. The area is quite charming. It's an old, working class area that's getting a new lease on life, but hasn't become too gentrified or posh (yet). We wandered around the old St Mary's Old Church (the parish was in the Doomsday Book), cut across Clissold Park and caught a bus down to Old Street.

After lunch in Hoxton Square -- a real lunch, unlike my usual rolls or sandwich for 2 quid -- we rambled through the streets of Shoreditch in search of street art, ghost signs and interesting architectural bits. Maggie and I have similar interests in all that stuff, plus the social, economic and political history of the area. Like much of London, this is an area that's really in transition, and probably always has been. The streets we walked in were mostly lined with industrial and commercial buildings, and in many places the old buildings are being torn down and new, glitzy office blocks are going up. But, if you stay off the High Street, and wander down the passages and alleys, you get glimpses of life here 100 years ago. Now, many of the warehouses have been converted to art studios, design firms, and clubs. Street art is everywhere. We searched out old favorites, and both discovered that things we'd seen a while back have now been painted over, and we found new things in their place. Although it's a bit sad to see the older things gone, the changes and transitions of everything from buildings to street art are what makes this such a great area to explore.

I caught the tube back to Belsize Park, got cleaned up, and then Spooner and I went back to his school for an evening lecture by journalist Bob Woodruff. I thought we were going to be hearing about Watergate, Deep Throat, and meetings in a parking garage, but that would have been Bob WoodWARD. This Bob is an ABC news correspondent who was blown up in Iraq and sustained a traumatic brain injury. He's set up a foundation to aid soldiers with TBI.

After that, we had dinner with Spooner's mates Greg and Esther in a restaurant in Belsize Park.

Pedometer reading: 20,600 steps, 8.45 miles

Expenses:

• £7 for lunch
• £15 for gifties for rosenbeans and myself
• £15 for drinks, dinner and my share of the cab ride
  

East Along the Thames

I just got back to Belsize Park and am sitting down to blog again today for two reasons: (1) Spooner and his flatmates are all out at an event at school, so I have the place to myself, and (2) I have to be out early tomorrow morning to meet a Flickr mate at the Angel -- we're going to Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington.

Soon after I left the house this morning, I realized that my spreadsheet, containing all the important info about where I was going, how to get there, what time things were open, etc., was on the floor of the guestroom. I was off the grid. Flying without instruments. But I freaked out only for a few minutes and went on with the plan that I had in my head.

Sunshine! Blue sky! The best weather I've had yet (it's been grey, but not a drop of rain). My explorations were all east of Tower Bridge. I started out at Tower Hill tube station, walked around the west and south sides of the Tower, and then walked around St Katharine Docks. The highlight was seeing Dead Man's Hole under the bridge -- a place where bodies were dumped into the Thames from the Tower -- but the tide was low and I just had to imagine the water taking the corpses out to sea.

Next, I walked over the bridge and down Shad Thames to the Design Museum, where I stopped in for a quick look at the shop and use of the loo. I debated going in to see an exhibit called Under a Fiver (stuff that costs less than five pounds), but I pressed on and walked along the Thames Walk through Bermondsey to Rotherhithe. I walked past many old wharf buildings (warehouses) that have been converted to luxury apartments, and many purpose-built luxury flats. "Luxury" is the operative word here -- this area has gone from a rat-infested, disease- and poverty-ridden area to prime real estate. I did see one block of council housing with nappies hanging up on the balcony.

At Canada Water, I got the tube to Canary Wharf and walked over to West India Quay to go to the Museum in Docklands, where the major exhibition now is Jack the Ripper's East End. It was a bit more about Jack the Ripper -- and less about the East End -- than I would have liked, but I did learn a bit about poverty, health, policing, etc., in that area in the late 1800s. Most interesting were the household-by-household maps of economic well-being in that time period. As you can imagine, there's significant overlap between the most abject poverty and the places the Ripper's victims lived or their bodies were found. And there was some overlap with what I'd seen on the walk about Jewish radicalism in the East End that I'd done on Monday.

The sky was still blue and the sun still shined when I left the museum, so I took the DLR to Greenwich and rode on the Greenwich Wheel. It's a Ferris wheel, with enclosed pods, that's smaller -- and cheaper -- than the London Eye. I liked it, and I might even be brave enough now to go on the Eye ... on another visit.

While I was in Greenwich, I did a quick loop through the Greenwich Market, where I bought some vintage buttons, and walked around St Alfeges church.

Travel tip: When you find a good loo, make a mental note of where it is so that you can do a pit stop there when you're next in the area. I knew that there were nice loos at the Design Museum and the Information Centre in Greenwich, so I stopped at both, and I'd been to the Museum in Docklands before so I knew to plan a pit stop there. On this adventure, I found fairly nice public loo near All Hallows by the Tower as well.

Pedometer reading: Just over 20,000 steps, 8.21 miles

Expenses:

• £2.40 for two rolls, a clementine, and a beverage (eaten throughout the day -- this kept me going just fine)
• £5.60 for the Museum in Docklands (I had a 20% off coupon that I got online)
• £7 for the Greenwich Eye
• £3 for Greenwich Market purchase
• Topped up Oyster with a tenner
  

West Along the Thames

Each time I visit London, I try to explore a new area. Last trip, it was Islington and a bit of Chelsea (rained out). This time, I chose Chiswick for one of my new adventures. Chiswick is well west of London -- it took about an hour to get there, past Hammersmith on the District Line.

My first destination yesterday was the Treatment Rooms, just a couple blocks from the Chiswick Park tube station. This is a private house, owned by an artist who has covered the front and back facades, as well as the garden wall, with mosaics. Oh, and there's a truck parked outside that has also been covered with mosaics, including lettering that says "My other car is a Turner Prize reject." There's a big tiki on the front, and little skulls and stuff, with wild bright colors everywhere. The back wall is the most interesting bit -- it commemorates Luis Ramirez who was executed by the state of Texas in 2005 for a crime he didn't commit.

Next, I walked quite a ways due south toward the Thames to get to Chiswick Park and Chiswick House. This was the estate of the second Earl of Burlington, who took the Grand Tour when he was 20, bought tons of art in Italy, became a great admirer of Palladio, and built his stately home using Palladian principles in about 1720 or so. The grounds are currently undergoing landscaping restoration, so there's a lot of orange plastic fencing in different areas and scaffolding on a bridge and a gazebo, but they are still lovely -- wild in part, and more formal as you approach the house. It's a popular place for people to walk their dogs, and the grounds were teeming with hounds and mutts of all sorts, most off their leashes and many wet from a dip in the pond. Disconcerting to an affirmed hater of dogs such as myself.

I did the house tour, which consists of a 20 minute movie about the Earl and then you're left to wander around on your own. Most of the rooms are empty of furniture, but the velvet wall coverings and ornamental gilding have been restored, as well as the famous Chiswick tables. Lots of the Earl's art collection is hanging on the walls. Photos not allowed indoors.

From there, I kept walking towards the river, cutting through the churchyard of St Nicholas to get there. I then walked along Chiswick Mall, which is right next to the Thames. It was low tide at the time, but I could see that high tide had brought the river up over the grassy bits across the road from the posh houses, and just a bit onto the pavement. Sometimes, the river comes right up to people's front doors, and they have special solid metal gates with rubber gaskets to hold the water back. A lot of uneventful rambling brought me back to the Stamford Brook tube station, with a stop for a panino and beverage before getting back on the tube.

Next destination: Pimlico, for the Tate Britain, where I saw the Frances Bacon exhibition. I didn't know anything about him, but now I can tell you that he was not a happy guy. The paintings are dark and disturbing. Where there are bright colors, they are associated with gore or violence. All his people are fragmented and distorted, shown as isolated or anguished. In need of something uplifting after that, I went through the Turner rooms and was surprised to see how loose and abstract some of his landscapes were. They were filled with glowing light, unlike the grey skies outside (but no rain yet since I've been here, so I really shouldn't complain).

My final destination was the Guess Where London (my Flickr group) meetup at a pub in the City, and I had plenty of time to get there so I decided to take the boat that goes from the Tate Britain to the Tate Modern. I walked across the Millennium Bridge, and trudged through crowds of office workers up to Gracechurch Street for the meetup. It was great to see my old mates and meet some new ones. We compared notes for our Open House Weekend plans, and I hope I'll run into a few of them on Saturday or Sunday. I'll be wearing my Flickr button and my Knitters for Obama button, so I should be pretty easy to spot.

Pedometer reading: 21,500 steps, 8.84 miles

Expenses:

• 60p for a bagel
• £4.20 for admission to Chiswick House
  
• £4 for a panino and limonata
• Admission to Frances Bacon exhibition: 0 (I used a friend's member card)
• £3 for boatride
• £2.30 for beer

Note: Rosenbeans has asked me to detail my transport expenses, but I can't do that. Each journey costs something different, depending on how many zones you cross. There's a maximum amount that you can be charged for a day, and if you exceeded it, your Oyster card is adjusted overnight. As I noted in my first post, I put £20 on my Oyster when I arrived at Heathrow. There was about 6 quid left on it from my April trip. I'll probably put another tenner or two on the card before the end of the week.