Where the Toffs Live

My regular readers will know that I almost never spend time in posh areas of London unless there's some history to be learned or art to see. In my ten previous visits, I had never set foot in Belgravia, though I'd seen it on tv (the Bellamy family of Upstairs, Downstairs lived at 165 Eaton Place). So, what better way to explore Belgravia's grand Georgian squares and pretty little mewses than with a City of Westminster guide. My friend Jenny has recently qualified as a Westminster guide, and she offered to take me on a personalised walking tour, one that she's working up for the punters. 

We met up in Grosvenor Gardens, across the street from Victoria Station, and then quickly left the traffic and chaos around the station for the serene residential squares of Belgravia.  Jenny pointed out that many of the toffs who live here go off to their country homes at the weekend, which explains why we saw very few people about. Mercs and Range Rovers were parked up and down the streets, and not a Ford Escort or Vauxhall in sight. Grosvenor is a name that came up many times on our walk, for Belgravia was originally (and much still is) the Grosvenor Estate, owned by the Duke of Westminster, who is obscenely rich. On our walk, we passed the former home of Margaret Thatcher (under renovation at the moment), dozens of blue plaques denoting homes of the great and the good (and the wealthy), and the scene of an unsolved murder. We also ducked down little mewses, where the stables for the homes had been. The grooms and other servants lived in the mewses, in what are now darling (and expensive) little houses and flats. I'm not going to go into all that I learned on my walk -- if you want to find out more about the area, you'll just have to book a place on one of Jenny's walks.

The tour ended at The Grenadier, one of the many little pubs that are tucked away in the mewses. It's reputed to be one of the most haunted pubs of London, though I have no first-hand ghost sighting to confirm that. We had a great pub lunch there (carrot soup for me and veggie burger for Jenny), which was very reasonably priced, especially with the £5 coupon I'd printed from the website. 

After lunch, we went our separate ways. I headed to Sloane Square; my destination was the Saatchi Gallery. In front of the gallery, there was a Saturday farmers' market going on in Duke of York Square -- I was thrilled to find the Pieminister there. I bought myself a Heidi pie (veg and goat cheese) to take home for later in the week. It's my all-time fave pie, and I like to eat at least one per London visit. 

You might remember that last year, Maggie and I stopped into the Saatchi Gallery after our long Fulham to Chelsea walk. The only thing we saw then was Richard Wilson's sump oil installation. This visit, I had ample time to roam the galleries from top to bottom. The main exhibition currently on is Paper -- various two- and three-dimensional works made on or with paper, by young British artists. Galleries are great because they're free, they generally show new -- and often edgy -- work, and they usually let you take photographs. I took scads of snaps of people as they photographed the art with their phones and iPads. I think I was channeling Tony Ray-Jones a bit. 

On my way back Spooner's flat, I got off the bus at Westbourne Park station so that I could take a little stroll through Meanwhile Gardens and check on my yarn bombs. I didn't bring any new knitted pieces with me this year, but I had left small pieces in the gardens on two previous visits. My 2011 pieces are still there, both looking faded and one starting to unravel. Of my bird and three flowers from 2012, only two flowers remain, droopy and overgrown with vines. It's like visiting old friends, but I'm sad to see that they've gone downhill since we were last together. I'll make a concerted effort to bring some bright, new woolly works on my next trip over.

Stats:
30p for the loo at Victoria Station

£10 for soup and ale at the Grenadier
£3.95 for Heidi pie (up from £3.50 last year)
17,002 steps (6.44 miles)

A Bad Palace and Good Art

I did not catch sight of Kate and Royal Baby Boy George yesterday, and I now know why it's perfectly fine to have been to London umpteen times and never have seen Kensington Palace. I wish I hadn't, but at least I got in free. 

It's really a theme park, and not a very good one. The idea is that, as you move from room to room, things are revealed to you -- through objects, whispering voices, and snippets of text stencilled on walls and furniture -- about the royal occupants. The first room, telling us about Victoria's coronation, had bits of writing by Victoria's privy council painted on a large table. When I saw "love" woven in a repeating pattern all over the carpet, I just should have turned back. I hate that sort of shit. But I pressed on, moving quickly through the rooms and not lingering to hear any of the whispers. The fashion part was ok -- several dresses worn by Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and Diana -- but the place as a whole was a waste of time. 

Everything improved considerably after I left the palace via the sunken garden (which was lovely). I quickly found the set of parish boundary markers I was looking for, just north of the Round Pond. Some anorak types are trainspotters; I'm always on the lookout for parish boundary markers. This pair was mentioned by J.M. Barrie in Peter Pan, but he took literary license and turned them into headstones of dead infants who were buried in Kensington Gardens. In fact, they mark the boundary between St Margaret's Westminster and Paddington Parish. I took several snaps for the Parish Boundary Markers photo group (surprisingly, they hadn't been added to the group previously).

Next stop was the Serpentine Pavilion, where I had a much-needed sitdown and my first food since landing. The cloud of steel, designed by Sou Fujimoto, is really cool -- it rises up into the trees and sky (not down into the ground as last year's pavilion), and provides good ops for climbing (not me -- I hate heights) and photos. This year's caterer is Fortnum & Mason. The had a very nice, though rather pricey, potato leek soup on offer. 

I took a look round at the exhibition in the gallery (arte povera works by Marisa Merz), then walked across the bridge to the former gun powder magazine that's now the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. I'm not too keen on the Zaha Hadid extension, but the exhibition there was fab -- an installation of works of unfired clay, ranging in scale from minute to elephantine, by Adrian Villar Rojas. 

My next, and final, stop was at the Science Museum to see Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr. This has to be one of the best photography exhibitions I've seen in years (in addition to the marvellous Everything is Moving exhibition that I saw last year at the Barbican). There are scads of black and white photos, taken in the late 1960s to early 1970s, of English people being uniquely English -- at the seaside, the derby, dog shows, church fetes, etc. The article in the Guardian describes it better than I can. 

Stats:
£20 to top up my Oyster card
£4.50 Soup at the Serpentine Pavilion
£4 Only in England exhibition
17,267 steps (6.54 miles)

Lessons Learned (or Forgotten)

I've been a very bad blogger this past year. Here I am, back in London where I left you all a year ago. I'm about to set off on my first day of adventures, but I thought first I'd tell you a bit about what I've learned about traveling to Blighty.

1. Don't try to get to or from Heathrow on a Sunday. Planned engineering makes a mess of the transport system. I've ignored that lesson on this trip, as I'll be flying home on a Sunday. Hope it goes better than last time.
2. Make one large withdrawal of cash from the ATM/cash point at Heathrow, rather than withdrawing £40 every few days. Each transaction racks up bank fees, so the fewer transactions the better.
3. It's very easy to book tickets online from the US for timed entry to exhibitions, train tickets, etc. I'm even learning that it's not scary to pick up the phone and call the UK when I have a question about something. 
4. Bring a pharmacopoeia of stuff from home. Medicines and remedies are different in the UK. I once ran around to four different chemists looking for saline nasal spray to no avail. Now I come prepared for all aches and ailments. 
5. I'm not sure if buying an Art Pass is a good idea. I got one this year for the first time, and didn't do the math quite right when I added things up and thought it would be a great deal. So, I'll be running around on this trip from museum to museum to try to get my money's worth. Failing that, I'll just have to come back before August 31, 2014 when it expires. 

On that note, I'm out the door now to go to Kensington Palace, a place I've never had on my list but it's free on the Art Pass so I may as well check it out. Perhaps I'll catch a glimpse of Kate pushing Royal Baby Boy George around in Kensington Gardens in his pram.  I'm also going to the Serpentine Gallery (new and old), stopping by this year's Serpentine Pavilion, and then going to the Science Museum for a photography exhibition called Only in England ... if I don't drop from exhaustion along the way.

Yesterday's stats:
$2.40 toll on the Mass Pike
$22.00 Logan Express bus ticket
$1.38 packet of crisps at the airport
3569 steps (1.35 miles)

Yarnbombing, sewage, and the arm of a chair

Sorry to have taken so long to write my post about my final day in London. I was on the move most of the day, and when we got back to the flat it was packing, dinner, and Downton Abbey. So, here's the belated recap.

Sunday dawned pretty grey and gloomy, with rain threatening, so I scurried down to Meanwhile Gardens for a bit of yarnbombing while Roger was up at the Queen's Park Farmers' Market. I left 3 flowers and a wee red bird on the railings in the wildlife garden:

I'm afraid that the rain that came later in the day probably wilted the flowers a bit, but I hope the staff found them on Monday morning and smiled. 

The rest of Sunday was taken up with our visit to Crossness Pumping Station, a Victorian sewage pumping station designed by Joseph Bazalgette and known as the "Cathedral on the Marsh." I'd been wanting to see it for ages, but it's only open to visitors about half a dozen Sundays a year. I'd seen my Flickr friends' photos of the interior, and read about it in The Great Stink, a not-so-great novel about the sewers of London and the creatures who inhabited them in the mid-1800s. On Crossness open days, volunteers -- all dressed in waistcoats and bowler hats -- steam up the working boiler, called the "Prince Consort" (each of the four engines is named after a royal), and tell people about the history and technology. From 1865, when Crossness was opened by the Prince of Wales, until the 1950s when it was replaced by a new pumping station, the four beam engines pumped sewage from the lowest level of the gravity-fed sewer system up to a reservoir, from which it was dumped into the Thames when the tide was going out. This system, which utilized 450 miles of sewers, brought the sewage eastward, out of central London where it had previously flowed directly into the Thames and resulted in very smelly and unhygienic conditions in the city. It all ended up in the same place after the sewers were built, just further downstream and closer to the sea.

The building is a Grade I masterpiece, with lovely detailed brickwork on the outside and the most elaborate wrought iron inside. Since the 1980s, when volunteers began the restoration work, they've not only restored the Prince Consort, but have painted much of the ironwork in a fantastic color scheme of green, red, white, purple, orange and gold. Donning hard hats, we roamed around with hundreds of other visitors, seeing three floors, watching the beam engine and fly wheel put through their paces, and chatted with the volunteers. (FYI, it only smells of sewage outside, if the wind is in the right direction. Not smelly at all inside the pumping station.)

Cold, rainy, miserable weather greeted us when we exited the building and waited about half an hour for the shuttle bus back to the Abbey Wood station for the train ride back into London. While Roger made our dinner, I did my packing. You're probably all wondering what goodies I would be bringing back from the UK -- prezzies for all my friends? packets of Hobnobs and Ginger Nuts? a bottle of excellent single malt Scotch? None of these, I'm afraid. Stuffed into my suitcase were a very full plastic envelope with all the paper bits I'd picked up -- exhibition brochures, a few postcards, and a small print of Amy Winehouse doing the Hoovering -- and the arm of a wooden hall seat of Roger's. I remember the whole piece, which was about six feet tall and made of oak. It had belonged to his grandmother, and he moved it around from place to place when he lived in Massachusetts. On the last move, when he was putting his stuff into storage before leaving for the UK, the hall seat met with an unfortunate accident involving a pickup truck and the pavement, and is now in bits and pieces. Under mysterious and inexplicable circumstances, one of the bits (the flat and slightly curved right arm) made its way to England and surfaced in Roger's move to Maida Hill. So, into my suitcase it went, to be reunited with the other bits that are somewhere in Northampton, MA. 

Despite not bring much tangible stuff back with me, I came home with lots of great memories and the sense of accomplishment of a trip well done. I ticked off most of the must-see things on my overly-ambitious spreadsheet. I didn't get lost once and I didn't lose anything. I spent about £230 for 9 days (cheap!), walked a total of 72 miles and took 640 photos. And I had some wonderful meetups and adventures with a bunch of lovely people who I count as good friends. Thanks to everyone who made UK Trip #10 so fab!

Stats:
10,995 steps (4.33 miles)
Expenses:
£1 for Crossness map and donation for van ride (Roger paid the five quid for my admission)
£10 to Roger for food and booze
$70 parking at the Massport lot in Framingham
$2.40 toll on the Mass Pike

Daytripping

Saturday was our day for a day trip out of London. I wanted to choose someplace where Roger hadn't been, which is getting harder and harder now that he's lived here for nine years. We decided on Rochester and Chatham -- two towns right next to each other, a short (and cheap) train ride from London. 

First stop was Rochester. Lots to see here -- a lovely, pedestrianised High Street full of 18th and 19th century buildings (and a few that are much older), a cathedral and a ginormous castle. We ambled down the High Street, stopping into a couple antique stores and charity shops. We visited the Six Poor Travellers House, established in the 16th century and used by Charles Dickens in his story "The Seven Poor Travellers." The house provided accommodation to poor travellers, plus food, ale and fourpence, until 1940. The upper storeys are still in use today as an almshouse run by the Council. The residents maintain a beautiful little back garden that we were able to walk around in. Our next stop was Eastgate House, a Tudor home also dating from the 16th century. It happened to be one of their infrequent open days, so we got to see some of the rooms inside. Once used as a school for girls, Dickens incorporated it as The Nuns' House in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. 

We arrived at the cathedral just after a wedding had started, so we killed an hour walking around the ruins of the castle and having a sit down and lunch at a little tea shop. When we returned to the cathedral, Roger did the audio tour while I went in search of the loo. I found it behind a tiny, unmarked wooden door that I think used to lead to a little hole where they put people to do penance. It was a nice loo, but I wouldn't want to be shut in the penance hole.

It was mid-afternoon by the time we reached the Historic Dockyard in Chatham. The place is vast, and you could easily spend a day there. Most of the families with kiddies had left by the time we arrived, which made for an ideal way to see a couple of the buildings. By far, the best part of it was the interpreted tour of the ropery, where rope is still being made in much the same way, although mechanised, as it has been for centuries, in a building that's a quarter of a mile long. We also saw a gigantic boat slip covered by the largest wooden-raftered roof I've ever seen. It's bigger than the cathedral, and looks a bit like an upside-down wooden ship's hull. We also got a personal tour of the submarine after all the other punters had left. 

A bus to Rochester and train to Victoria got us back to London as the rain was starting.

It's now my last day in London. I'm going to do my yarnbombing this morning while Roger goes to the gym and/or the market. Then, we're off to Crossness Pumping Station.

Stats:
15,763 steps (6.21 miles)
Expenses:
£16.10 return train ticket for Rochester
£3.50 tuna & sweet corn sandwich and tea
£4.80 return bus fare for Chatham
£16.50 admission to Historic Dockyard
£10 to top up Oyster card