10 Full Days in London

We start by being very grateful to our generous, stylish, interesting friends, Sarah and Phil who have let us stay in their London pad which is just like them.

I’m writing this while looking at the view of St Paul’s Cathedral from their apartment in the Barbican.

We are in the City of London’s only residential estate.  The Barbican described as a prominent example of British Brutalist architecture, it is also influenced by Le Corbusier.  It was built to house the middle-class in central London, including an arts centre, a kind of utopian paradise,  in an area just near St Paul’s Cathedral that had been bombed in WW2.  But that’s recent history.

What is a Barbican?  A barbican is a fortified outpost or gateway, such as an outer defense to a city or castle, or any tower situated over a gate or bridge which was used for defensive purposes.

As you walk around the Barbican you see remnants of  The Roman Wall.   “From its earliest foundation the Roman city of Londinium was almost certainly surrounded by some kind of fortification. As well as providing defence, the construction of a stone wall represented the status of the city. Using the evidence of excavated coins, archaeologists have dated the construction of the first stone city wall to between ad 190 and 225. 

The wall was about 4km (2.5 miles) long, enclosing an area of about 134 hectares (330 acres); it originally included four city gates with an additional entrance into the legionary fortress at Cripplegate.

We arrived in London, Alex’s first visit in at least 25 years, and Rob’s first ever trip to Europe.  We’d missed the worst of the “Beast from the East” – though we did strike a couple of cold days as you’ll see from photographs.

It was the week that Donald Trump and Theresa May announced they were going to send missiles into Syria.   The thought of missiles being fired  reminded us we are staying on a reclaimed bomb site from the second world war.

London feels so familiar, so many places and accents from TV and the movies, the children’s picture books and nursery rhymes, the history we’re taught, and the stories that come through the music that we have grown up with, not forgetting the Monopoly board.

It took reading the brilliant talk by Richard Flanagan at the National Press Club to remind us of our own history.  He was lamenting the terrible bleakness in our present National leadership but his talk offered hope:

“And yet if we were to have the courage and largeness to acknowledge as a nation both truths about our past, we would discover a third truth, an extraordinary and liberating truth for our future, about who we are and where we might go.

We would discover that though this land and its people were colonised, a 60,000-year-old civilisation is not so easily snuffed out. And the new people who came to Australia, in their dealings with black Australia, were also indigenised, and, in the mash up, Indigenous values of land, of country, of time, of family, of space and story, became strong among non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous ways, forms, understandings permeated our mentality in everything from Australian rules football to our sense of humour.”

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/18/richard-flanagan-national-press-club-speech-full-politics-black-comedy

Richard’s speech was beautifully timed for us as all the Commonwealth leaders descended for the CHOGM just around the corner at The Guildhall.

Modern London is such a mix of people from all over the world, we often hear more French being spoken than English.  The fabulous West Indian accent which has now melded with the London accent. It’s a wonderful multicultural town.

We took a “Secret London” Tour with travel journalist Sophie Campbell who met us at the Royal Exchange just opposite the Bank of England.  This 3 hour tour by Sophie really explained the workings and origins of London.  She pointed out the intertwining serpents, not the single snake seen in medical areas, but 2 snakes:  The caduceus which means trade and commerce.  She explained the guilds, or Livery Companies of London which still have enormous power today in terms of voting rights for the local City of London council. The City of London is the little square mile, about 7 thousand people, not Sadiq Khan’s patch who is Mayor of Greater London representing millions of people.

 

Sophie ended the tour by taking us to the modern money making centres: The Bloomberg Building (an outstanding example of sustainable design) also Rothschilds and Lloyds of London.  Her point:  this is the real power and heart of London, it’s not the royals, in fact symbolically the Queen must gain permission to enter the city of London.

She left us at the Leadenhall Poultry market and the story of Old Tom the Goose born in 1797,  who had escaped slaughter by flying up into the rafters of the market place and refusing to come down – he lived to the ripe old age of 37. When he died of natural causes he was buried on the market site.

So beloved was Old Tom that he even made it into the Times Newspaper!

However, you can still raise a glass to Old Tom at the market in the pub which bears his name; Old Tom’s bar.  We had a soda water and ploughman’s lunch which did include smoked duck, but not Goose.

 

The other big international news while we’re been here has been about Facebook and the inappropriate use of personal data.  Mark Zuckerberg has been appearing before Congress.  A lot of  people are now are openly talking about deleting Facebook, but many of them can not quite bring themselves to do it.  It’s not just that we’re addicted, it can be such a good thing.

Within four days of us being in London, Rob had started to gather information on events nearby.  There is so much going on in London, and how would you possibly choose something that would be to your liking?  How do you avoid the tourist traps?  One invitation seemed interesting, to experience the alternative and underground forms of dance, style and musical expression of East London Dance’s “IDENTITY” .  This infused hip hop, breaking, voguing, krump and waacking, some of which we’d never heard of.

Again using the iphone we figured out the right bus to catch

A collaboration East London Dance Groups and Shoreditich Town Hall, a building no longer used as a town hall following Council amalgamations, and fought hard for by the local community to keep as a public space.

The moment we arrived we felt like we’d arrived into a very special and diverse and inclusive community.  Without social media it could have taken months to have stumbled into such a wonderful event, and to have felt so comfortable within this group of young Londoners.

Rob loves a map, and although our 10 days remained in inner London we did extend to the edge of the map twice, both times to some beautiful natural areas. Walking on Hampstead Heath and at London Wetlands

And just in case you think Crocs are “so last year” – these were for sale at the very cool Dover Street Markets

We watched a couple of grand old people talk about trees in David Attenborough’s The Queen’s Green Planet.  It was charming but also some soft diplomacy from the Queen on Climate Change.  Beautifully Prince Harry made a joke about the fact that travels the world planting trees, but then turned the conversation to say he couldn’t think of a more important thing to do.  It was a lovely show.

Sadly her corgi Willow, the last in the line of corgis she’s bred since she was 18 died while we were here.  As dog lovers we send our condolences.

Other random pics