European Epic # 1: Touchdown Londontown

This week I set off on a 6-week holiday in Europe, a holiday involving a number of "firsts" for me.

One of my "firsts," for this blog, is that I'm not telling my readers up front all about everywhere I am going to go.  We'll find that out together as the trip progresses!

As anyone who's been can tell you, travelling in Europe is not cheap by comparison with North America.  One of the biggest factors making this trip possible for me is the amount of money I'm saving by using airline and hotel points along the way.  The essence of the loyalty points game is to earn points on the cheap in North America and then spend them where the cash cost would hurt the most.  I earn all over Canada and in smaller cities in the United States, and cash in when travelling in some of the more expensive destinations like New York, Rome, Hawaii, or London.

As usual, I cashed in my Aeroplan points to fly from Toronto to London in business class, and as usual I took the daily Air Canada "Daytimer" flight that leaves Toronto at 0910 every morning and arrives at London Heathrow at 2100 the same evening.

I learned years ago that I could reduce my jetlag to a minimum when I didn't lose a night's sleep on the flight over to Europe (sleeping on planes is something I have never been very good at doing, even with a lie-flat bed seat).  The good news?  The Daytimer flight is now operated by a high-tech Boeing 787 jet, with numerous features that reduce jetlag even further.  And, of course, it's hard to beat the comfort of the individual Business Class "pod" on Air Canada, a mode of travel I could never afford if I had to pay actual dollars for it!

I spent the daylight hours of my first two days in London doing almost nothing I hadn't done before and enjoying it all immensely.  Among other things, this led to some sunny walks in the gardens of Regent's Park...

...and along the Victoria Embankment on the north bank of the Thames, with the spectacular view towards the skyscrapers of the City of London and the ever-majestic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.

One of the main sights along the Embankment is "Cleopatra's Needle", a slightly-off-the-mark name for the Egyptian obelisk which was actually erected in Luxor by Thutmose III about 1400 years before the birth of the famous Greco-Egyptian queen.  It's flanked by a couple of faux sphinxes.  Oddly enough, this is not another example of European "raiding" of other countries' cultural treasures since it was given to Britain by the then-ruler of Egypt and the Sudan in 1819.

I also paid a return visit to the nearby Temple Church, an ancient Gothic building with a most unusual history and design.  Originally built by the Knights Templar, it now belongs to the Inner Temple and Middle Temple, two of the Inns of Court which are the professional law societies and colleges of the United Kingdom.  It's thus now called the Mother Church of the Common Law.

Typically, in Gothic religious architecture, the long, straight portion of a church is called the nave, and is where the hoi polloi would sit, while the often-rounded end is called the chancel and contains the seating for the choir and priests, as well as the high altar where communion would be celebrated.

The Temple Church gets it all backwards.  The round church was built first, consecrated in 1185, and the linear three-aisled chancel was added later on, in the 1250s.  The original round church thus serves today as the nave.

For a music buff like myself, there's one notable aspect of the Temple Church's history aside from its long and distinguished record of choral and organ music.  One night in (I think) 1962, the strings of the Sinfonia of London moved into the church after midnight with conductor Sir John Barbirolli.  They were, of course, trying to capture a recording without daytime traffic and other noises.  The result was, and remains, one of the great classics of recorded music -- a well-nigh definitive performance of the famous Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

For my first three nights, I stayed in a modern Holiday Inn just off Kensington High Street.  Like many London hotels, this one has unbelievably tiny rooms, although they are certainly comfortable.  Unlike many (most?) central London hotels, this one actually has a "leisure club" with an indoor pool -- always an attractive feature for me (although, in the event, I didn't get around to using this one).  Add in a tube station on the corner, and several good restaurants nearby and it becomes an ideal base.

On my third day, I travelled for 70 minutes northeast of London by train, to the small city of Ely.  In British law, it's considered a city despite its size and population (20,000), because it is the home of a cathedral of the church of England.  This one, too, is architecturally distinctive -- and on a much grander scale than the Temple Church.  Ely and its cathedral are built on an island of clay soil in the midst of the Fens, a vast region comprising wetlands which were gradually drained and converted to agricultural land during the 1700s and 1800s.

I started with lunch, on a riverside patio, and enjoyed the views of all the old canal boats converted into houseboats.

Here are a couple of views of the exterior of the cathedral.  We'll start with the elaborate Lady Chapel, built in the mid-1300s at the height of the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary.

Here's the elaborate multi-arcaded front of the cathedral.  The peculiar off-centre look of the main tower with the southwest transept resulted when the matching northwest transept collapsed in the early 1300s.  The soft ground on which the cathedral was built was the culprit.

Inside, Ely features a long, tall nave built in Norman times (the 1100s) with rounded arches.

At the entrance to the chancel, the elaborate carved choir screen frames the oak choir stalls.  A few weeks ago, my brother, sister-in-law and niece sang daily services in these stalls for a week.

At the highest point in the chancel stands the high altar, with the elaborate carved screen known as a reredos behind it.

But the great architectural glory of Ely is the magnificent Octagon.  The cathedral formerly had a tall central tower over the crossing of the two arms of the building.  This tower collapsed in the 1300s, likely also due to the soft ground.  One or more men of sheer genius evolved the solution, by removing the original four corner pillars and replacing them with eight pillars placed further out from the centre, on firmer ground.  And here's the result.  On the outside, it looks elaborate, but not too extraordinary otherwise.

The extraordinary is what you see on the inside.

The elaborate vaulting on top of the eight pillars is actually just a wooden skin.  The real lifting work is done by an elaborate timber framework concealed behind the ceiling.  If anything ever causes the Octagon to fall, it will have to be replaced with metalwork of some kind because there are no longer any trees in the United Kingdom big enough to replace those timber structural frameworks.

The remarkable effect on the interior of the cathedral is the sheer amount of space in the crossing because of the octagonal layout, and also the huge amount of natural daylight shed into the interior of the church by the four corner windows and the eight windows in the octagonal lantern tower.  Ironically, all that daylight makes the interior very difficult to photograph without professional-quality equipment.

For my last night in London, I transferred to the Renaissance Hotel St. Pancras.  This deluxe hotel occupies several floors of the former Midland Hotel attached to St. Pancras railway station, the terminus for the Eurostar high-speed express trains that operate from London through the Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

This station originally housed the terminus of the Midland Railway, and the single-span arched iron roof over the platforms (now lovingly restored) was an engineering wonder when it was designed  and built by William Henry Barlow, opening in 1868.  When you recall that this was the height of the "steam age" with coal-fired locomotives belching thick black smoke into the air, you can understand why high-arched roofs were de rigeur for Victorian railway stations.  And you'll also understand why the iron structures always looked so black in the old photographs.

Here's an internet view of the modern version of the building.

The hotel building was designed by George Gilbert Scott in his signature Gothic Revival style, and opened originally in 1873 as the Midland Hotel.  The resemblance to Barry and Pugin's Palace of Westminster -- that's the correct formal name of the Houses of Parliament -- is both unmistakable and non-accidental.

Today's hotel looks very different, with the red brick exterior beautifully cleaned and restored.  The hotel today uses the lower floors of Scott's building together with a modern wing extending along the west side of the station.  The upper floors of  the old classic hotel have been converted into loft flats and condominiums.

For dinner, I visited the Booking Office restaurant, located inside the former ticket office of the station.  (It was too dim for photography, but here's a pic from the hotel's website with an arrow to show where I was sitting).

Certainly it was convenient to walk from room to train the next morning without even going outside.

This blog will resume with my first train journey through the Channel Tunnel.