This series of articles covers a short weekend break in London over 30 November - 1 December 2002. We had a look around London on the Saturday and visited a record and film fair in Wembley on the Sunday, catching up aith a few celebrities.
Click each of the photographs below to read the articles. A link at the bottom of each one will bring you back to this Index.
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.
Saturday 30 November 2002. There's some sort of event on in Wembley on Sunday 1 December so Fran and I are staying in a Premier Inn at Wembley for the weekend. I can't quite remember what it was advertised as, but there was a large record fair and a particular draw was that both actresses Caroline Munro and Ingrid Pitt were to be there. We had met them both some five years previously and thought it would be fun to meet up again.
9:30am Saturday morning we head for Waterloo Station on the Underground. We had decided to try to get on the London Eye. At this time of morning there were no queues. We got tickets and walked straight on.
Whilst we were near the bottom it was interesting watching the pods discharge and take on passengers!
There's a fabulous view all the way around and it's easy to spot landmarks such as St Paul's and Big Ben.
There were few enough people in each pod to be able to get to a window to allow a good viewpoint.
It wasn't what you would call the sunniest of mornings - the view must be even better when it's sunny. But given that we are on the last day of November, we can't really expect sunny skies and weather fit for t-shirts and shorts.
At the top of the wheel with the next pod on the same level. The pod looks very space age!
Starting to come down. The whole trip takes half an hour. A great view of the Houses of Parliament, or the Palace of Westminster whichever floats your boat. Though if you're going to be picky then your boat is the one turning sideways further up the river past Vauxhall Bridge...
After passengers leave a pod it is scanned with metal detectors before anyone else can enter. This is done quite quickly so that the wheel isn't forced to stop to long each time a pod unloads and loads.
As we walk away to wonder what to do next we notice a piece of blue string fastened to a lamp post - obviously the lamp post too was trying to remember something...
Sometimes the work trips came thick and fast and this time we'll take a look at just a few of them over the period of May-June 2005.
We will start off in London on Friday 6 May 2005. London was a regular stopping off point as it was easy to get there for national meetings, there were lots of universities and colleges in and around it who could travel in for training sessions and there were several important partners that Jisc worked with, such as the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Association of Colleges and their subsidiary arm, the National Information and Learning Technolgies Association (NILTA). All three of these organisations were based in Centrepoint, just off New Oxford Street.
At 30 storeys, it was one of London's tallest buildings at this time and the view never failed to entrance me. On a clear day you could follow the line of the River Thames down to the Tower of London and make out St Pauls Cathedral, HMS Belfast, The Gherkin Building (30 St Mary Axe as the owners tried to name it, though once the nickname had taken hold of the national imagination it was going to struggle to be anything else) and further down the river to the Canary Wharf building.
Tuesday 10 May 2005. The Sage Building on the Gateshead side of the River Tyne as seen from the Newcastle side. Jisc infoNet was hosted by the University of Northumbria who were my official employers and I would regularly hoist myself over for meetings and sometimes for training (both giving and receiving) or project work.
Sometimes it would be onto a train with a choice of Blackpool to York then York to Newcastle or Blackpool to Preston; Preston to Carlisle and finally across country from Carlisle to Newcastle. Sometimes it would be by car up towards Kendal, then through Sedbergh and Kirby Stephen over the moors and hills of Cumbria and North Yorkshire up to the A66 at Brough to the A1M at Scotch Corner. From there it was north on the A1M to Gateshead, passing right next to the Angel of the North and finally crossing the Tyne Bridge into Newcastle.
Thursday 26 May 2005. Back in London again. Due to the time it took to get there any training sessions in London meant I had to travel the day before and whenever possible I tried to fit in a meeting with either someone from the London or South East RSCs. This evening I remember going for a drink with someone from the London RSC who took me to see the Peter Pan statue at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
The following day was spent running a training course for Further Education colleges at International House on Piccadilly, opposite Green Park. This park was enclosed by the Poulteny family on the site of what had been described as a medieval swampy burial ground for lepers. It passed to King Charles II in 1668 and was officially named Green Park in 1746 as it was mainly meadow land with trees but very few flowers.
Charles II's queen, Queen Catherine of Braganza must surely have been one of England's most unhappy queens. She, as a Portuguese princess, was a Catholic which made her highly unpopular both at Court and generally with the population. Also she struggled with the English language and whilst Charles on occasion defended her, he was not shy about making known his many affairs. Indeed he made her accept his official mistress, Barbara Palmer, 1st Duchess of Cleveland as one of Catherine's Ladies of the Bedchamber. When Charles first presented his known mistress to the Queen, Catherine fell into a faint. Lastly she was unable to bear the King a child, suffering three miscarriages during their married life.
There is an oral history (i.e. not written down) that Catherine had all the flowers in Green Park pulled up in revenge after King Charles picked some, only to give them to one of his mistresses.
Friday 24 June 2005. Chester Racecourse on a soggy morning after setting up a stand that I was manning at the annual Summer e-Fair of Jisc's Regional Support Centre Northwest. The RSCs supported colleges with e-Learning which included both online learning and any use of Information Technology inside or outside the classroom. The day before I had been giving a training session in Wales and rather than drive another two hours to home and back again on the following day, I stayed overnight in Chester with the RSC team.
During the period covered in this article there were more trips including Lincoln, Taunton, Tynemouth and probably more that do not appear in any other articles published on the index linked below. Sometimes it rains just too much even for me to contemplate taking photos...
27 June 2006. Once again I was in London for work and it was one of several visits to the Centrepoint building. The Association of Colleges (AoC) was based there, as was the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA) and The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).
It afforded some wonderful surrounding views of London. Senate House was the flagship building and administrative centre of the University of London. King George V laid the foundations stone in 1933 and it opened three years later, a huge Art Deco edifice that somehow managed to disappoint both the traditionalists and modernists. It was, at the time, the home of JISC Regional Support Centre for London. It was such an iconic building that it features in some big box office films such as Nineteen Eight-Four, Batman Begins, The Dark Kight Rises, Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang and No Time to Die. This is not a full list...
The sinuous curves of the roof of the British Museum was quite new at this time and this was the first time I had been able to get a glimpse of the external view.
Looking downriver towards Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast.
Looking west along Oxford Street. The Post Office Tower (or was it the BT Tower by then?) dominates the skyline and the green swathe of Hyde Park is clearly seen.
15 February 2007. I'm in London again for a Directors' Meeting of the National Information and Learning Technologies Association.
It's the Chinese New Year, so I go down to have a look around Chinatown behind Leicester Square.
The following morning and we are on the 15th floor of the International Press Centre on Shoe Lane. As with the more well known Pudding Lane where the Great Fire of London started in 1666, Shoe Lane was so named because shoes were made there.
Not everyone was happy that the windows in this room stretched from floor to ceiling but the view was excellent. Looking towards the bottom left of the photograph, I love the way you can find the older gorgeous buildings dwarfed by the larger but far less impressive modern skyscrapers. Alas all the design seems to have gone from design these days.
The Old Bailey and the now-familiar shape of 30 St Mary Axe, known popularly as the Gherkin Building - a name the owners hate and discourage. Probably a non-starter of a hope.
A series of articles describing a weekend break in a somewhat freezing, though occasionally sunny London 4-6 December 1995. Our first real sight-seeing trip to the nation's capital city.
Each article can be seen by clicking/tapping on the eight photographs below. A link on each page (or the [back] button) will bring you back to this index page.
Friday, 23 March 2018. We had booked ourselves in at the Weir Hotel and Pub in Walton-on-Thames and were going to fulfil a long-nurtured desire to visit Hampton Court, once home to Henry VIII and a few following kings and queens of England.
We motored down from Blackpool along the M6 wondering again why so many miles of motorway should be coned off and speed restricted for just a few yards of actual activity. By the time we got down onto the M25 and the land of drivers with evil glares, ever willing to open up a space to let you in then speeding into it themselves blaring their horns, we decided to visit Brooklands Race Track and Museum.
This was the first racing track in the world, constructed in 1907 and the site of many early speed records. It was also an early centre of aviation with aircraft factories and events centred there. The 1965 comedy film Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines is centred around a race track "Brookfield" that looks remarkably like Brooklands.
The track was steeply banked to allow the cars to achieve higher speeds on the curves. Only portions of the track still survive.
At this point the far edge of the track is 29 feet above the lower part. If you visit, do not be tempted to try to climb it. It is slippery and dangerous and a long way down, rolling and having your skin scraped off! I remained on the lower level with only a brief calculating glance wondering how far I'd get up even with a sprint. But then... I'm a bit past my sprinting years... About 50 years past them I think...
This was the finishing straight. The barriers were being placed that afternoon to cater for an event celebrating the Mini which would take place over the weekend with many hundreds of Minis being brought by clubs and individual owners. I had one myself in 1972. Great fun and much better to my mind than the ever expanding things that bear the Mini name these days.
In fairness to the museum at Brooklands I am not showing lots of photos of the fabulous collection of cars and aeroplanes in the collection. Apart from this which was a great surprise and joy. Babs was the Land Speed Record car of John Godfrey Parry Thomas. On 27 April 1926 Parry Thomas set a new World Record, taking his car through the measured mile at Pendine Sands in South Wales at a speed of 169.3 miles per hour (averaged from a two-way trip through the mile). Knowing it wasn't high enough to last for long he returned the next day and achieved 171.02 mph. On 4 February 1927 Sir Malcolm Campbell raised the record to 174.88 mph.
Parry Thomas made another attempt on 3 March 1927 on the sands, but his car was trailing smoke. On his return run Babs slewed sideways, rolled and then carved a gouge out of the sand as it spun round to a halt. Spectators raced to the rescue but found a grisly scene. Warning! Skip now to the next paragraph if you are of a sensitive nature... Parry was still sitting in the driving seat but some part of the car, possibly the chain that drove the rear wheels from the engine and which had snapped at around 2000 revs, had taken off a part of his head, which was lying on the sand at the side of the car.
Parry Thomas was buried at Byfleet Church at Brooklands. The car was left on and eventually sank beneath Pendine Sands. In 1969 she was excavated by Welshman Owen Wyn Owen and painstakingly restored. Parry Thomas had bought her for £125 from Count Louis Zborowski, whose racing cars were all named Chitty Bang Bang. Sounds familiar? Babs had been Chitty Bang Bang 4. Powered by its rebuilt 27-litre Liberty aero engine, it is once again in racing condition.
Similarly with the fabulous collection of aircraft, including the first British Concorde, VC10, Harrier Jump Jet, Wellington, Sopwith Camel, SE5a and Vickers Vimy and many more - this is the only photo I'm showing. This is the intrepid crew of His Majesty, The Sultan of Oman, Qaboos bin Said Al Said's Vickers VC10 which was designed and built at Brooklands and is fitted out in the most opulent and luxurious manner once behind the cockpit. Even the toilet is spacious enough to allow the Sultan's valet to be in attendance.
Time was marching on and we took our leave of Brooklands, having spent a fabulous hour and a half there. Even so we missed several exhibits including the entire building housing London buses. We'll wait for next time when three will come round together...
This is The Weir at Walton-on-Thames. Basically a pub but it was very comfortable, we were welcomed and looked after and the food was excellent. We had the room with the three windows in the gable above the open door on the right and had a lovely view over the river and use of the balcony.
There is, as the name suggests, a weir on the river at this point but it is on the far side of the river and it was possible only to see the foam produced by water pouring over the out-spill and not the out-spill itself. On our side of the river an unobstructed channel allowed small boats and skiffs to by-pass the weir.
On the Saturday we caught a train from Walton station into Waterloo, London and walked our feet off, visiting Westminster Abbey and then walking up to and along the shops of Regent Street and Oxford Road before heading back to Waterloo. I have to say I found Westminster Abbey disappointing. You can no longer get into the Shrine of Edward the Confessor where many of our past kings are buried, but have to pay extra to do so in a small group. "It's a very delicate area and the jewels have all been stolen from the shrine," I was told when I asked the reason for the closure. They didn't mention that the jewels were stolen many hundreds of years ago and that they were simply taking more money off people who had already paid a not inconsiderable entry fee.
My other gripe is that so many of the tombs are not labelled, but have lengthy Latin inscriptions in a far from easy to read font and even with a vague smattering of latin I wasn't able to determine who was in most of them. Elizabeth I's tomb is obvious as is King Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York (the White Princess). But I'm not really sure if I identified Margaret Beaufort's monument correctly and couldn't find Anne Neville, the widow of King Richard III at all. I'm afraid I came out feeling rather cheated...
We had been told that it was a walk of about three miles to Hampton Court, from the hotel along the tow path of the Thames. I'd have thought nearer to four miles. I don't have long legs at my manly five foot five and on Sunday morning it took us about one hour and twenty minutes to walk there, not counting a short break for a morning coffee at East Moseley Cricket Club.
The weather kept dry, even if it wasn't promising anything and the views along the river were pleasant, but we were happy to come to a bridge across the river and see the Palace of Hampton Court beyond it.
Once again I am not going to publish any photographs of the fabulous interiors. You are allowed to take photographs in most rooms apart from the Crown Room holding the replica of King Henry VIII's state crown and the Cumberland Gallery where some very famous and well-known paintings are hung. The Great Hall is huge and instantly recognisable from TV programmes such as The Tudors or Wolf Hall. There is the Haunted Gallery - part of Henry's processional route from his quarters to preside over his wider Court on Sundays and Holy Days. Along this corridor his fifth queen, Catherine Howard, about to be arrested for adultery in 1541, ran to find Henry and plead her innocence but was seized by guards almost within reach of his door and was dragged screaming back to her own rooms. It is said that her ghost haunts the gallery. But she must have been taking the day off...
But it is an earlier queen, Queen Anne Boleyn, mother of Queen Elizabeth I, for whom much of the royal palace was furnished and built. Thomas Wolsey had created a spectacular palace here and in 1525 presented it to the king. Unable to secure the King a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Henry chucked him out of the palace in 1529 and started building anew, spending vast sums of money to create chambers for his intended new bride. She was never to take up residence here. Looking across the Clock Courtyard, to Anne Boleyn's Gate, which was at least named after her. Perhaps not by Henry....
The astronomical clock with its single hand has a 24-hour dial around the edge, a rotating outer dial showing the day, date and current sign of the zodiac and an inner lunar dial rotating to show the phase of the moon. High and low tides are indicated - essential as the principle form of transport to London was by barge, as the rapids between the piers of London Bridge were very treacherous.
After the walk to the palace and then a few hours walking around it, we decided to ride back to the hotel and, walking down to the railway station, picked up a taxi without any problem. We got back a good deal quicker than we had taken to make the outward journey that morning!
It was now Sunday afternoon and the pub was very busy. We found a table and sat with a drink, or two, whiling away the afternoon before deciding it was time to eat. I took a couple of photos of the bar as it was starting to go dark. A company whose premises were opposite the rear of the pub found a car parked right across their entrance and phoned to see if it was someone at the pub. The staff made enquiries but no-one admitted to it and over the course of the next hour, much excitement was made of the arrival of the Police and eventually a tow truck... Someone was going to return to their car a sadder and hopefully less self-important person than they had been when they ignored the possibility of the entrance being in use!
And then the sun went down in spectacular style across the river. Was it just those stories of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, or was there really a headless ghost haunting the riverside?
A final look at the Weir Hotel Walton-on-Thames. I would without hesitation recommend it.
