Holiday in Transition # 2: The City

So here I am: in London again.   And I do mean in London!  It's been a good fifteen years since I spent any time inside the core areas of London.  Sad to say, but truth must be served: if you want to stay right in the middle of the action in London, you have to be prepared to shell out upwards of £200 (or over CDN$400) per night for even fairly basic and tiny accommodations.  If you want a really good quality hotel, then £400 (or CDN$800) is a more reasonable starting figure and some of the really top hotels are quite capable of charging you £800 or more per night for a view of the kitchen roof and vent stacks.

In other words: London is bloody expensive.

So how can you beat this outrageously expensive hospitality industry?  As far as I can see, there are three options:

[1]  The Fanciful:  Bunk in with a friend who has a lovely inner-city condo.

[2]  The Desirable:  Cash in frequent stay points for a hotel room in London.

[3]  The Hard Work:  Stay in an outer suburban hotel and commute into town with a train pass.

Each one has its obvious advantages and its obvious drawbacks.  On this trip, I'm going successfully with Option # 2.

Okay, so I'm right in London (for the first time since the summer of 2000).  Now, what to do?

Quick, think of a famous sight in London!  Now, what came to mind?  Big Ben?  Buckingham Palace?  Westminster Abbey?  Trafalgar Square?  Or perhaps (going more modern) The London Eye?

Now for the bad news: none of these, strictly speaking, are within the traditional borders of "The City", in other words, of London as it was for centuries before royal prerogatives and modern growth grabbed hold and changed everything.  The London Eye is on the wrong side of the Thames for historic London, and all the others are in Westminster which lies to the west of The City.

I haven't really been down into "The City", also known as "The Square Mile", since my very first visit to London in 1975, so I decided that this should be one area to visit for this brief stay.

For reasons of nostalgia as much as anything, though, I started west of the City, at Trafalgar Square itself.  This post, then, is actually more about the area from the Square to the City than about the City itself.  The towering monument to Admiral Lord Nelson, guarded by four massive bronze lions, is one of the most famous symbols of London.

Nearby stands the National Gallery, with marvellous collections of paintings, and the adjacent National Portrait Gallery which is especially fascinating to any history buffs -- all kinds of famous names from Britain's storied past hang on the walls there, as painted in their own day.

Also on the square is the famous Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the birthplace of the famous Academy of St. Martin-etc., which is a world-renowned chamber orchestra.

Heading east along the Strand you immediately come to the imposing Charing Cross Station, a major rail terminal.  Most of the huge bulk of the station building facing the Strand is actually a hotel.  In the forecourt stands a Gothic-styled replica (really a reinterpretation) of the towering Eleanor Cross which originally dated from the 1290s and was placed a short distance to the west.  The original was destroyed in the 1600s by the Puritans.

As soon as you pass Charing Cross, you start bumping into the churches.  The first two are St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes.  They're favourites of mine because of their locations, with the heavy traffic of the Strand roaring right past them (and in the case of St. Mary-le-Strand, right around the church!).

Just behind St. Clement Danes is the imposing Gothic structure of the Royal Criminal Courts, colloquially known as the Old Bailey.

Once you pass the Old Bailey, the Strand becomes known as Fleet Street, and the south side is lined with the "chambers" (read: offices) of numerous law firms.  This area is the location of the "Inns of Court" which are the professional legal associations.  In a courtyard tucked in among the Inns of Court is the historic Temple Church, which was originally the London headquarters of the Knights Templar.  I've visited the Temple Church before, so I took a pass on it, but for the sake of completeness here is an internet photo.

Among the lanes of the Temple I turned down to the bank of the Thames and walked for a while along the waterfront walk.  This eventually brought me to the newest bridge across the river: the Millennium footbridge. 

This bridge connects the city with the south bank next to the Tate Modern gallery, and right by the replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.  I walked part way across the bridge and back, and then continued up to Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece.  When you look at Wren's Cathedral, built after the old Gothic St. Paul's was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, it's hard to imagine any other building on the site.  It also seems like it must have been the great lifework of the architect, and yet it is but one of the nearly 60 churches he was commissioned to build in the City after the Great Fire.

From St. Paul's I continued east down Cannon Street into the City proper.  The interesting thing about "The City" is that it's all in two basic styles of architecture.  This was the area that got burned to the ground during the Great Fire of 1666, so one of the predominant styles is the fashionable Italian Romanesque of the 1670s -- exemplified by the dozens of churches, all of which seem to have been designed by Sir Christopher Wren.  Yes, he really did have a royal commission to do all that construction, and the miracle is that this busy architect managed to get no two churches exactly alike.

The other style is ultra-modern, post World-War-Two, which of course begins with that more recent time when large areas of The City got flattened and burned by Nazi bombing raids.  So as I walk through The City, I get this odd feeling of riding an out-of-control time machine that keeps whirling me from 1680 to 1980 and back again without stopping.

The City is the business and banking district of London, and thus is full of suits -- and their wearers -- on weekdays.  Weekends are much quieter down here, whereas the more touristy Westminster including the West End theatre district, is humming pretty much all week long.

Along the way, I detoured in a loop up to the intersection where these impressive buildings reign.  The pillared structure facing the camera is the Royal Exchange, and the much larger building on the left is the storied headquarters of the Bank of England.

In between the two runs Threadneedle Street, and that is only one of the many quaint street names to be found on a map of The City.  I suspect most of these names predate the regular use of such suffixes as "Street", "Road", or what you will.  These names are given verbatim:

Aldermanbury        Lothbury        Milk Street        Seething Lane        St Mary Axe
Cornhill        Undershaft        Bevis Marks        Eastcheap        Mincing Lane
Crutched Friars        Crosswall        Minories        Pudding Lane

It was in the last and most notorious of these streets that the Great Fire broke out, an event now commemorated by a tall monument, also designed by Wren.

Speaking of quaint names, I have one more to share -- just because the name itself always gives me a little chuckle..  The church that bore this name is long gone, but when built it was one of Wren's City churches.  It's full name, no word of a lie, was "The Church of St. Peter le Poer and St. Benet Fink".

I ended my walk at Cannon Street Station, largely because I was suffering from a massive case of "tourist feet", and headed back to my hotel on the Underground.

The next day, I joined up with my dear friend, Janine, who lives west of London, and together we went to The Shard.  This is a relatively new skyscraper of 78 stories, built right over London Bridge rail station -- and so located just across the river from The City.  It's the tallest viewpoint in London, and popular enough that you have to reserve your time slot to go up in  advance.  But it was well worth it, because it's a prime place to get a good aerial view of The City -- even if the windows are all splattered with the previous night's rain.

From here you get a grandstand view of the modern skyscrapers in The City known, whether formally or not, as "The Gherkin" and "The Razor".  Londoners have always been renowned for their quirky sense of humour, and it definitely comes out in these names.

You also get a spectacular view westwards towards the familiar sights of the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace.

(I'm still trying to figure out how and why the lettering came out different sizes on those two pix.)

After the Shard we carried on east to Greenwich where we did a pub lunch and then visited an exhibition at the Maritime Museum about the famous diarist Samuel Pepys and his life and times, which included both the last great attack of the Plague and the Great Fire of London.  The 1660s were a busy decade!

There's so much more that one could say about London, and this one post certainly doesn't do more than scratch the surface.  I wanted to give you a bit of a look at a part of London that many tourists don't get to see, and maybe whet your appetite to go there yourself.  I definitely need to go back -- and stay longer on my next visit!  Better start saving those hotel points right now!

But in the meantime, off to Rome -- the subject of my next post.