Trafalgar Square
The very first time I visited England (on an Educational Foundation tour with my seventh-grade teacher the summer after eighth grade) the very first place we visited was Trafalgar Square. Every time I've been to London since then, a sentimental stop at Trafalgar Square has always been one of the first things I did. This time was no exception. The square itself isn't particularly exciting, though it does have Nelson's Column with its guardian lions, several fountains and statues, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church with its Café in the Crypt and brass rubbings centre, and the wonderful (and now wonderfully free!) National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. The square is currently under construction to be made more "pedestrian-friendly" in one of Lord Mayor Ken Livingstone's grands projets.
Facing St. Martin-in-the-Fields and Charing Cross Road, in the northeast corner of the square. (Sad fact: 84, Charing Cross Road, the site of the bookshop in Helene Hanff's book of the same name, is now a Pizza Hut, and even the blue plaque that used to mark the site is no longer there.)
The main building of the National Gallery (a new annex housing the medieval art collection as well as exhibits has been added to the left). The lack of an admission fee meant that if I happened to be in the area with nothing to do, I could just wander in, which was lovely. The Rembrandts, da Vincis and Botticellis were among my favorites, as well as this fragment of a painting by Rogier van der Weyden. In the final month I was there, the National Gallery hosted an amazing Titian exhibition, and the Portrait Gallery a wonderful collection of Julia Margaret Cameron photographs. The Portrait Gallery also had a fun Byron exhibition, which included one of his "expose your throat to the elements!" flowing shirts and the Albanian folk costume he wore in the famous portrait, but alas not the disputed Fuseli portrait that figures in Stoppard's Arcadia.
Nelson's Column, facing the south side of the square, towards the Thames. Big Ben is visible in the background. Legend has it that those instrumental in constructing the column held a dinner party on the top before the statue was installed.
Gordon Square
The heart of literary Bloomsbury even more than Bloomsbury Square itself, Gordon Square once was home to Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, among others. These buildings now house Birkbeck College, where I tried to get a job mainly because of the location. The hostel I stayed in when I first arrived in London was located mere blocks away, so I passed this square and the British Museum on a nearly quotidian basis. The Woolf house is in the middle of the block. I read Night and Day and reread A Room of One's Own while I was in London, both of which are books permeated with urban geography, as are most of Woolf's novels.
One of the things I enjoyed
most
about being in London was recognising places from novels or literary
biographies.
This also meant that some of my mental preconceptions of London
neighbourhoods
were a hundred years too late, or else overly influenced by Neil
Gaiman's
Neverwhere
(a tendency shared by a surprisingly high percentage of the Americans I
met in London).
The (New) British Library
Sometime between the second (1996) and third (1998) times I visited London, the British Library moved from its traditional location within the British Museum to a new building in Euston, next door to the King's Cross St. Pancras rail station. While I recognise that the Library desperately needed more space, I still think the brick box it now inhabits is hideous, and I miss browsing the rare books collection in huge rooms lined with books from floor to ceiling. At least it still displays the original manuscripts for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Xanadu", Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the cancelled chapters from Jane Austen's Persuasion (the only draft of any of her novels to survive) as well as her juvenilia, and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. It also had an interesting selection of literary audio recordings, including Woolf, whose voice was entirely different from how I had imagined it, to the extent that I had imagined it at all.
It probably looked nice in the drawings...
The strange juxtaposition of the über-Victorian St. Pancras and the British Library illustrates the diverse purposes to which red brick may be put.
The British Museum and the (Old) British Library Reading Room
I somehow utterly missed hearing about the huge redevelopment project of the interior courtyard of the British Museum, so I was quite shocked to walk in and see a sea of white marble topped by a huge asymmetrically curved glass ceiling. Even with advance knowledge, it is still truly impressive.
..
..
I should have done a panorama photo, but the effect is largely a result of space and light, and thus difficult to capture in a photograph. The building in the middle is the old British Library Reading Room. One of the beneficial side effects of the relocation of the British Library is that the Reading Room is now open to the public. The books it contains were a benefactor's bequest; while they cannot be checked out, anyone can come sit with the ghosts of Virginia Woolf, Karl Marx and thousands of others to read and reflect amongst the green leather desks.
The central skylight.
The newly restored roof, with the mid-nineteenth century colour scheme. The paint was specially formulated to "float" over the cracks in the dome.
A panoramic view of the bookshelves and desks.
A closer view of books...
...and where to read them.
St. Paul's Cathedral
When Ben visited me, we climbed to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, which afforded marvellous views of the city, and caused me to be humming songs from Mary Poppins for days. Unfortunately the lovely ceiling mosaics were in the process of being restored and thus covered with scaffolding, but the view remained intact, and was all the better now that I could actually identify many of the buildings.
Christopher Wren's great neoclassical dome. The lower viewing platform is just above the columns; the upper platform is immediately below the spire.
Facing towards the south side of the Thames. The small round white building on the left is the New Globe. The central building with the tower is the Tate Modern, which is the only one of the major museums I never visited. The bridge is the Millennium Footbridge, built for the turn-of-the-century celebrations but almost immediately closed due to a rather frightening sway. It has since been reinforced and reopened.
The Globe was the site of the London theatrical production I enjoyed most, the all-male Twelfth Night starring Mark Rylance as Olivia. (I'm really hoping to return to London for a week this summer to see all of the Globe's plays this season, which feature for the first time two productions with an all-female cast, including that usually-misogynist classic The Taming of the Shrew [August 2003 update: alas, perhaps next summer...]). Later I visited the Globe Exhibition, which was quite interesting (all the more so since I had just read Susan Cooper's King of Shadows) for its information about the history of both the Old and New Globes as well as how a modern theatrical company performs in the traditional style (and, of course, period costumes).
Facing southwest.
The wheel is of course the
London
Eye, which I always meant to take a ride on but never did (it was
closed
during a large chunk of the time I was in London, which didn't
help).
Somewhere to the left of that, near the bridge, is the South Bank
Centre,
home to the National Theatre
and
the National Film Theatre, and a
favourite
hangout of mine. Since both the NT and the NFT are
state-supported,
they offer great student discounts. This was especially useful
since
the NFT hosted a comprehensive Ingmar Bergman festival in January and
February,
which meant I was seeing at least two films a week. I was quite
impressed
to see dozens of people waiting outdoors for an hour in the freezing
cold
on the off-chance that they might get a ticket to The Seventh Seal
(I was fortunately indoors, and got one of the last tickets, which made
me very happy since it's my favourite film). Despite the rampant
concrete, the walk along the river in that area is still quite nice,
especially
at night. On the weekends there's a large open-air book
market.
(Though I spent many, many hours in the area, I never took any
pictures,
which is why I'm inserting all this commentary here.)
Kew Gardens
Kew is a southwestern London suburb. The gardens were once the extensive grounds of Kew Palace. Alas, the Chinese bridge to which Lady Croom's is superior in Arcadia no longer stands, or if it does I never found it.
This Georgian building is now a museum of something or other.
The Palm House dates to Victorian times. Its oldest occupant is a plant brought to England in the 1700s. The statues in front represent the many allegorical animals associated with the Queen.
I visited during the annual spring orchid festival, of which this was one of the more impressive displays.
Two views of the grounds. Despite its more manicured appearance (Enlightenment rather than Romantic, Capability Brown rather than Culpability Noakes), Kew feels as outside the city as its wilder northern cousin, Hampstead Heath.
.....
The Great Pagoda, a grand eighteenth-century folly. Unfortunately only a single staircase leads to the top, so it's closed to the public.
Hampstead Heath
Hampstead, one of the poshest neighbourhoods in London, located on the west side of the heath. My flat was amazingly within walking distance of the heath, but on the less fashionable east side. The heath is the largest wilderness area in London, and contains a Men's Bathing Pond and a Women's Bathing Pond, though no one but birds braved the waters while I was there.
While my pictures are all of
the
open hill, the heath also has many wooded areas, some of which do feel
quite wild (despite silly Victorian names like the Vale of Health).
22, Bentinck Street
A month after arriving in London, I was finally hired as the receptionist for a small law firm, Benson Mazure Solicitors (both Benson and Mazure had long since retired). The office was located near the Bond Street tube station (on the Central and Jubilee lines, which was highly convenient for getting to the South Bank Centre after I got off of work at 5:30 p.m.), a few blocks north of Oxford Street and several blocks south of Baker Street and Regent Park. After a few months working there I realised that it is quite close to the supposed site of the house in Kathryn Lansky's Double Trouble Squared, one of my favourite children's books, about two sets of telepathic twins who encounter a literary ghost related to Sherlock Holmes.
The office itself was once a residence, and still contained (blocked-up) fireplaces. It was quite odd as I behind the ground-floor front window answering phones to think that a hundred years previously someone else had read or embroidered or played whist in that same room. Edward Gibbons lived across the street; around the corner were the residences of Hector Berlioz and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Bentinck Street, towards Manchester Square, home to the Wallace Collection.
Archway
My home, located in north London at 139 Junction Road. Archway wasn't particularly exciting, but it had excellent transit links, several small grocery shops with fresh produce, and an organic foods shop, so I was quite happy. The view from my window shortly after what was apparently the worst snow storm to hit London in a decade. The churchlike building was converted to flats, but still provided a good (if housing-envy-inspiring) view.
The outside of my flat. I entered through the purple door to the left of the windows, went up one flight of stairs to the bathroom, another flight of stairs to the kitchen and two bedrooms, another flight of stairs to a landing, and yet another flight of stairs to three bedrooms including my own. My window is on the top left.
My tiny room with a view, after I had started to pack.
