Fleet St., St Pauls and Golden Tableware

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.

Return to London and Wembley Record Fair Index

Moreton-in-Marsh Time

Friday 31 May 1998. The last day of our holiday. Fran and I left the hotel in Bourton-on-the-Water and headed northwards, passing through Stow-on-the-Wold and Tramp-on-the-Road (I made-that-one-up), stopping for a while in Moreton-in-the-Marsh, where I took a few photographs.

This quiet and picturesque village was a centre for the preparation for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day in the Second World War and a display in a shop window had photographs of the main street, full of rows of U.S. tanks.

Where the cars are parked in this photograph, the tanks were lined up side by side. It was a miracle that the Luftwaffe did not catch a glimpse of the preparations and warn the German High Command.

"Vas ist das?!? Panzer-in-der-Street!!! Achtung! Raus der Fliegers-in-der-Stukas!!!"

The building seen in the first photograph had a splendid sundial carved into the face of the stone. The weather at the time was such that it was seen to its best advantage. Sundials were in use long before governments decided to fiddle with time and have Summer Time for "saving light" and in fact as pubs weren't subject to opening hours back then farmers could work until it went dark then go for a firkin - whoops no, scratch that, looking at how it reads - then go for a pint no matter how early it was. Though there were one or two places where they could go for a - no!!!!! Keep it clean!

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes. In the days when sundials told the time and villagers were left standing outside the shop on cloudy days waiting for the owner to turn up, there was no such thing as Geenwich Mean Time. Anyone mentioning GMT in the pub would have probably got a gin and tonic from a slightly deaf barman. Every town decided its time on factors such as when the sun came up. It wasn't until the railways arrived that people came round to the idea that for train timetables to make sense it had to be ten o'clock in Bristol at the same time it was ten o'clock in London.

You can imagine the chaos and confusion it caused when they moved from one system to another. There is a sign under the clock tower in Ramsgate that says:

"Ramsgate Mean Time is 5 mins 41 secs faster than this clock"

A bit like decimal coinage being brought in during the late 1960s. People had to stop saying tuppence and start saying two pence in order for others to understand which system they were using. How you do that when answering the question What time is it? I'm not sure, unless that marked the demise of It's ten after three for ten past three... I do like to stimulate a touch of cerebral action in this blog. As Miss Franny's DS game says: it does you good to give the old pre-frontal cortex a workout!

And that pretty much brings this series about our 1998 holiday to an end.

We stopped briefly in Stratford upon Avon on our way home, to have a look at Shakespeare's birthplace and admire the formal brick patterned paving outside that he must have known and loved. He lived there throughout his young life until his mother told him he was bard...

Addendum I received a message from the lovely Mags, who says '"Moreton In Marsh" John.... I always thought it was "In The..." until last year. Lovely place. x'

A lovely place indeed - and all the better for my erroneous "the"... Apologies to Moreton-in-Marsh residents and afficionadoes everywhere. However surely in the suggests something more substantial than a mere in...?

Return to Wiltshire, Cotswolds and Avon 1998 Index

A Yarn of William Shakespeare

For the last time... Sunday 5 June 1994. This entry finishes the tale of our long weekend in the Cotswolds. If you've been following this holiday you will know that after mixed weather, the day we have to go home is the most gorgeous British summer's day and we have stopped off here and there on our way home. We are heading north and out of the Cotswolds now.

The yarn of the title comes from this - the ancient yarn market at Chipping Campden. It was a market, meeting place, somewhere dry to shelter from rain and ancient pestilence and generally a spot where local elders could gather and moan about teenagers and the lack of a decent day care centre...

One chap in 1437 sat there for a full week thinking it was a bus shelter, before someone told him buses hadn't been invented yet. Once they had been invented three turned up at once...

We had dinner in a pub and then went into the local museum which was so crammed full of things that the presentation didn't make sense! But who cares? It was like rummaging through a junk shop without a single uninteresting thing to find. It was brill!

The old projectors from the local cinema, probably closed down in the 1930s at the end of the silent era, were resplendent in one room with a pile of clutter around them, only some of which was relevant to the world of film. A huge balloon of the wicker basket type was propped up in one room, as apparently a local, before the days of flight, decided man could and should fly and built this contraption to prove it.

I can't believe I've never made it back there, the place was a goldmine of treasure! We carried on north and into Warwickshire, coming to this delightful cottage, familiar through countless Christmas biscuit and chocolate selection box lids and jigsaws.

Quite how William Shakespeare ever managed to find a bit of peace to woo Anne Hathaway amidst all those hordes of Japanese and American tourists flocking all over the gardens I'll never know.

"Sweet William, let us take to the sun lounger and ... lounge..."
"Hark! What is this I see before me? A camera lens? Oy! Piss off!!!" It couldn't have been easy...

A couple of miles further and we are in the centre of Stratford-upon-Avon - always a good trivia question to trap the unwary: what's the name of the river that runs through Stratford-upon-Avon? Almost as good as: what's the name of the ship in Mutiny on the Bounty?

Anyway, this is Shakespeare's birthplace. In the house, rather than on the pavement we hope. You can imagine him as a boy staring out of the bedroom window and saying "Those patterned bricks in the road look nice now, but I bet it won't be long before they're tripping people up..."

And so, in a blaze of wordly thought, a tumultuous crescendo of prose and textly passage (Shakespeare wasn't above making up words so why shouldn't I?), we end this tale of Cotswoldian (see!!!) wanderings and head off back up to Blackpool. Forsooth... and Roger, Sooth's lodger...

Return to England's Cotswolds Holiday 1994 Index Page

What Do You Remember?

Someone asked me what it was that I remember most about holidays.

If you have a look at my website you'll see we have been fortunate enough to have travelled fairly widely over western Europe.

Well I remember lots of things because I always make a point of taking lots of photographs and then using them as a basis for a written description when we get back. That's what the website is really about - it's so I can remember stuff when I'm 90!

But what I remember most are the odd bits of unintentional humour - those things that just happen that make you fall about laughing either at the time or later.

For instance - we were in Verona for a day's excursion from Lake Garda in 2003. We spent a lot of that holiday in the company of Kell and Denise Traynor from New Zealand who proved to be excellent company, were well travelled and knowledgeable themselves and who both had a good sense of humour.

We were taken to this small courtyard (above right) to see Juliet's balcony. William Shakespeare made it a crucial and memorable scene in "Romeo and Juliet" and Juliet herself certainly existed and had a balcony. Of Romeo there are no records at all, although there was certainly a family feud.

Anyway it was a warm day and we had been walking for a few hours. The four of us went to sit under the arched gateway to the courtyard and I was sitting next to a large Italian man who all of a sudden let out an enormous fart, like a clarion call to the gods...

Kell, who was furthest away from me shot me a look of horror - perhaps he thought it had been me, I'm not sure, but we soon dissolved into giggles and then laughter and at the point where someone said "Phwoar... Romeo!!!" the Italian got up and left us without looking back!

It was stupid, infantile and all the rest but it will make me smile for a long time to come!

So what do you remember most about holidays?