Saturday 30 November 2002. In my revious article we finished on The Strand with a look at St Clement Danes. We'll start in more or less the same spot then walk along Fleet Street to St Pauls, across the river to Shakespeare's Globe and then take a bus to the West End shops.
From St Clement Danes, we turn to admire the facade of the Royal Courts of Justice or as they are more usually known: The Law Courts. This is the home of the UK's High Court and Court of Appeal, although it also tours the circuit to sit in major cities around the UK. For most of England's history such courts were held at Westminster Hall - they are not called "Royal" for nothing.
Creating a purpose-built home for the Justices required two Acts of Parliament to be written and passed into Law and the displacement of families from 450 houses which had to be demolished to make way for the building which commenced in 1873 with the building being officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1882.
Standing opposite the Royal Courts of Justice is the venerable survivor of the Great Fire of London, The Wig and Pen. Named for the tools of the legal profession it was one of no doubt many such establishments catering for the lawyers, judges and clerks in the area. Dating from 1625 it was set up by the Gatekeeper of Temple Bar - then the western gateway into the City of London - as a handy place to buy food and drink from the curious who paused to view the severed heads on poles above the Temple Bar gateway. It lost a lot of regular thirsty customers when Fleet Street ceased to be the centre of newspaper publishing and since the mid 2000s has traded as Thai Square providing flavours probably unknown in the 17th century! Talking of which... Oliver Cromwell is said to haunt the place.
The old gate of the City was a wooden arched wall across the roadway but unsurprisingly that didn't survive the Great Fire of 1666. A new stone archway with three arches was built 1669-72. Once again the good folks visiting London could look upon heads on poles but by the late 1800s the gate was creating a barrier to the vastly increased amount of horse-drawn traffic.
It was dismantled in 1878, each of the 2,700 pieces of stone catalogued and stored and in 1880 it was bought and taken to Hertfordshire to be re-erected as the gatehouse at Theobalds Park. It stayed there until 2003. The following year it was returned to London stone by stone on 500 pallets, the most travelled gatehouse surely in all England. (I haven't researched that - just watch all the comments prove me wrong in the coming weeks...) It now stands just north of St Pauls Cathedral in Paternoster Square. I must go again to see and photograph it sometime.
Nowadays a tall column stands dividing the carriageways of the road and is decorated by the statue of a dragon rather than heads on poles. It marks the meeting point of The Strand to the west and Fleet Street to the east and is halfway between the former royal residences of the Tower of London and Westminster Palace.
Now on Fleet Street we find The Punch Tavern, formerly the Crown and Sugar Loaf it was renamed in the 1840s in honour of Punch magazine, which was published at nearby Fleet Street premises.
St Pauls Cathedral is one of the great visitor attractions of London. Built to the designs of Christopher Wren (who had long wanted to replace the previous incarnation, luckily for him the Great Fire of London gave him an opening). We were not allowed to take photos in St Pauls - which is a bit annoying as there are few postcards on sale. It would have been better to ban flash and tripod photography and let people get on with it as long as there were no services taking place. So no photos of the interior I'm afraid, but we went to see the tombs of both Christopher Wren and Lord Nelson.
Nelson, having travelled back from the site of his death at Trafalgar in a barrel of brandy, camphor and Myrrh, laid in state for three days at Greenwich, was transferred on a State Barge used originally by King Charles II, the coffin transferred to the Admiralty to rest overnight before being taken by funeral procession made up of 32 admirals, 100 captains and 10,000 soldiers to St Pauls.
At St Pauls there was a four-hour funeral service following which his coffin was lowered through the floor of the nave and placed in a sarcophagus originally supposed to have been Cardinal Wolseley's from Tudor times. King Henry VIII had planned to be buried in it himself in a grand monument, but this was never completed and Henry today rests in a coffin in St George's Chapel, at Windsor.
Coming out of St Pauls Cathedral we had our first viewing of the Millenium Bridge. This was after it had been cured of wriggling about of its own accord and before (just!) the spells of dark wizards chasing Harry Potter made it wriggle all over again... So we walked over with confidence, part of a quite large number of people doing exactly the same, but only half of whom were doing it in the same direction!
On the southern bank of the River Thames is the recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The original was built in 1599 using materials from an earlier theatre which had been demolished elsewhere in London. It burned down during a performance of Henry VIII when a cannon used as a prop, misfired and set fire to the thatch and wooden beams. No one was hurt, although one man had his pants catch fire. The flames were put out with a bottle of ale. (I wonder if he was a liar...?)
We had a look, found we couldn't go in, breathed a sigh of relief - I'd had more than enough of Shakespeare at school - and walked back over the Millenium Bridge and caught a Routemaster red bus back towards the West End. Miss Franny, for some strange reason, seemed to want to look around the shops...
I'm not 100% sure where we saw these but it was either Selfridges or John Lewis and I think the latter - a set of 23 carat gold on silver plate full cutlery service. A bargain at the knock down price of £5,675 from the original price of £11,359. A salesman asked if he could help. "I don't really think so..." I said with a note of sympathy for his lost commission. He shrugged, "You never know!" he said.
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