Day Three: Thursday in London

On Thursday, we went first to Kew Gardens.
The cast-iron framework for this greenhouse--the Palm House--was an engineering marvel for its time (1844) and is an artistic marvel in ours. At the time of the worst windstorm in this building’s life so far, the glass had already been taken out and the plants protected—as part of scheduled maintenance. It was a lucky (no) break.
I found the lavender right away. It had been dry in London and grass was often yellow.Once you paid the admission, a guided tour (which was informative, but did not cover anywhere near the entire gardens) was free.
I learned some new landscaping terms, though maybe not all useful when planning our own yard. A long expanse of grass and trees that frames a view a long way away is called a 'vista.' This is Kew's "Thames Vista." However, even when you were there--not just in this photo--the Thames was too far away actually to see.

I'm going to let the photos do the talking for a bit:

Keith wins the prize for most dramatic photo of the day, taken in the Evolution House.

For all the impressive garden architecture, landscaping, and horticultural feats of daring with exotic plants, I most enjoyed the old, old trees--another thing that there is no chance of in our Waunakee garden.
During the bad storm, this tree (Turner's Oak) did not fall over, but the wind lifted up both the tree and the ground around it. Surprisingly, the old tree then experienced a burst of growth, and Kew gardeners have ever since aerated the soil around their prized trees.The graft seemed like a good idea at the time (1834.)


The tree walk was designed by the same engineers who built the London Eye.When we were done in the gardens--well, okay, when we ran out of time--we walked down to the Thames, strolled along the riverbank into the village, and had some ale, wine, and Pimm's at this little pub. Ellie ordered the Pimm's; I did not know what it was. What it was: delicious!
We had taken the tube to Kew Gardens; we returned on a Thames Riverboat Cruise and snapped these on the way back into the city.I was intrigued by the bridges. Each had a distinct and unique personality.After the boat, we took a 'flight' on the London Eye, a very large Ferris wheel with large clear pods instead of open seats. The wheel does not stop moving, but goes so slowly (a full circle in 30 minutes), people can get on and off even while it moves.
The Eye was built as a temporary attraction for the millennium celebrations, but turned out to be so popular that it is now permanent.
Views from the Eye: Parliament(above); Buckingham Palace and St. James Park (below.)


After the Eye, we took the tube to a different neighborhood. London has special crosswalks known as ‘zebra crossings,’ where cars must give pedestrians the right-of-way. The famous Abbey Road crosswalk is one of these. When we visited in the early evening, tourists were taking brazen advantage of their ability to make traffic stop while they imitated the Beatles. I feel so sorry for people who live in the neighborhood. We did not take any of our own pictures because I did not want to add to the hubbub. It was fun, though, to be near the Apple Studios, and it is touching that there is still so much affection for the Beatles.

Walking through this neighborhood, we were so impressed by the English gardening. When I’d heard of English gardens before, I’d pictured countryside cottages or large estates—something with serious square footage. However, within the city the tiniest front yards managed to grow spectacular displays. Hydrangeas, particularly, were lush and flamboyant.I think it must have something to do with the long hours of sunlight. The island is so far north that on Thursday, for example, sunrise in London was at 5:00 AM and sunset was at 9:10 PM. In Wisconsin on the same day, sunrise was 5:33 AM and sunset was 8:34. London got over an hour’s more sunlight. And boy, do they make good use of it!

Next: Day 4--NOT in London...

Day Four: Friday in (well, near) London

We had set Friday aside for a day trip. On Thursday night, as we ate delicious Indian carry-out for supper, we considered Windsor Castle, Hever Castle, Stonehenge, Bath, Salisbury and a few other places as our next day's destination. However, as Chaucer explained,

Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in distant lands.
And specially from every shire's end of England,

And so to Canterbury we went.

Buying 'day return' train tickets from Victoria Station is a lot easier than anything Chaucer's pilgrims had to endure, but it does not make as good a tale.Ellie worked hard on planning and keeping us on the right track. Keith and I really appreciated it.First thing you do when you leave the Canterbury train station is to walk up and over massive, mostly flint, city walls. They were first built by the Romans in the first century AD and later strengthened by the Normans in the 11th Century. We were seriously impressed at their size and strength, but just imagine the builders’ amazement at modern creations if they could see their wall today.Canterbury is a simply charming city. It is fully tourist-oriented--has been for a thousand years, I guess--but it has managed not to let itself get ‘Disney-fied.’ There were a few touristy attractions, but they did not detract from the ambiance on the streets, and we did not go in them. We did four main things in Canterbury: toured the cathedral; took a boat ride; visited a museum built over partially excavated Roman ruins; and visited the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey.

Here is Keith taking a picture of the Cathedral gate and the picture he took.

Photography is allowed inside the Cathedral. The event that made this cathedral a pilgrim magnet was the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170 by four knights accidentally dispatched by King Henry II. The King, frustrated with his former friend, had shouted "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and four knights within hearing range decided that they would. They killed Becket at an altar in the cathedral. We did not make a point of visiting the actual death spot, but the windows and statuary in the cathedral tell the story of the martyrdom over and over. These windows tell the story of the murder and King Henry's later penance......and this statue beside the tomb of the 'holy blissful martyr' shows poor Thomas all dressed up with a sword through his head. I marked the sword with an arrow. Sorry for the poor focus; I did not want to use flash in the cathedral.Among all the gorgeous old and new stained glass windows and intricate carvings, I was most moved by these stairs going up to the chapel where Becket's tomb used to be. How many pilgrims’ feet, carrying the weight of how many heartbreaks and drawn by the light of how much hope, wore those stairs down like that?

I cannot imagine how the builders in the 15th century constructed the central tower, called the 'Bell Harry Tower' for some reason. These photos cannot capture its height. The first is a regular shot, looking straight up into the tower; the second shot is with zoom.
When you think of all the challenges and burdens they faced in those times and that they created this anyway, the power of the innate human drive to create beauty and to reach for the divine becomes apparent.

Here's one for you, Ted: Saint Theodore.
Maintenance seems to be a relentless responsibility here and in other historical buildings we saw.
Cathedral cloisters and gardens:


Each of our guides on this trip could have been sent by central casting. At the British Museum, the Iranian lady told us about Mesopotamia; the old academic gentleman enlightened us on the Enlightenment. At Kew, a sweet, mature, Judy-Dench type led us around. And for Canterbury Cathedral, we got an prim, starched elderly gentleman who was quite set in his attitudes and beliefs and who did not make any effort to gloss over what he knew to be correct. When speaking of things that happened in WWII, he spoke of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The young people of today certainly cannot do the kind of hard work it took to…do whatever. Ellie was appalled when he muttered, as a group of noisy tourists with developmental disabilities walked by, that he did not "know what those people are doing here.” He was knowledgeable, though, and I wrote his rigidity off as part of the atmosphere. He had useful opinions, too. In his view, it is inappropriate to make the Cathedral’s visitors exit through the gift shop, as he informed us he was supposed to do. Instead, he told us how to leave via a more inspirational route. (We did not. We left the Cathedral with rose earrings, a tea towel for June, many postcards, a souvenir guide book, a cross-stitch sampler, and more that I forget.)

We got lucky again with the next tour guide, our riverboatman on a Canterbury Historic River Tour. But, shoot, none of us took his picture. He was a gregarious, cheeky, 20-something local who rowed us up and down the River Stour telling us about architecture and history, some of which I believed. It was a nice break from all the walking. The neatest site was one that did not photograph very well because of the odd way the trees and buildings framed it: a unique spot where you could look up and see all 12 spires of the Cathedral at once.

The Canterbury area--in the southeastern corner of the island, not far from the sea--was among the first inhabited in Britain. Paleolithic artifacts can be found. In the first century, the Romans displaced the local Celtic tribe, the Cantiaci (from whom the city gets its name), and built quite a large walled city with an amphitheater, a temple, many nice houses, and public baths.

The city was abandoned when the Romans withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century; it fell into ruin and began to disappear into the earth. Over the next 100 years, Saxons, Angles, and Jutes came to the area and lived among and over the ruins. When some World War II bombs blew deep holes in the ground, archeologists and locals used the opportunity to locate many Roman ruins and artifacts and to figure out the size and layout of the Roman city.

Over one of the excavations in the old city, they built an interesting museum. This small museum is targeted as much to kids as to adults, but it had a nice mix of life-size dioramas illustrating daily life in the Roman city and actual artifacts. How does an 18-inch-tall blue glass pitcher survive intact?

Most satisfying was the archeological dig that they left in place in the lowest level of the museum, where you could see the foundation of a Roman home and a mosaic floor still in the earth right where they were created and later found. We saw these floors; the photos are from postcards.If I ever knew, I had forgotten how advanced the Romans were. In the ruins of the home's foundation, you could see the remains of the central heating system, which circulated hot air underneath the floors. Other displays showed the plumbing systems and the fine glass and pottery they used.

We walked and walked (with me imagining the Roman mosaics still buried a few yards beneath our feet) and finally came out the opposite side of the city from where we had arrived, at the West Gate where all the pilgrims used to come in.
On our way back through town to the train station, Ellie went shopping while Keith and I visited the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey, the site of Christianity's introduction into Anglo-Saxon Britain in 598 and one more reason to dislike Henry VIII.King Ethelbert's queen, Bertha, was a Christian from France, and two of the conditions of the marriage were that she be allowed to bring a priest and be provided a chapel. Ethelbert gave her a small Roman building, which is--astonishingly--still in use as an active church, but we did not have time to visit.

Anyway, in 597, the pope took advantage of the opportunity and sent a prior, Augustine, with 40 monks to go talk to Ethelbert and Bertha about possible expansion of the franchise. The King found Augustine pleasant enough and so allowed him and his monks to build an abbey. In a few years, the king accepted baptism, and the course of England's religious history was set.

By the 1500s, the Abbey was as big and impressive as Canterbury Cathedral just across the way. It housed a thousand years of the graves of kings and religious leaders, precious art work in its many chapels, inspiring architecture, and a library of 2,000 manuscripts.

Henry VIII had it dismantled--taken apart--in his dissolution of the monasteries. I guess most of the stones were re-used, but the religious gold and silver artifacts were melted down and the metal sold for Henry's treasury. Only 200 manuscripts survive. In 1539, Henry started to build a new castle for his then-queen, Ann of Cleves, (that is the red brick in the photo above) but before it was finished, he lost interest in both her and the castle.

We got back to the apartment and crashed again, munching on carry-out leftovers as we watched television. British television was enjoyable. The female newscasters are not the cooky-cutter Barbies who populate American infotainment, but reasonably normal-weight, normal-looking women of all hair colors and ages.

I was also impressed with the seriousness with which British television reported on the war in Afghanistan. Every newscast that I heard began with news of the war and reported it seriously, covering strategy, casualties, and objectives. The political and military leaders they interviewed were no more forthcoming or coherent than ours, but at least the journalists were asking real questions. It may be that I pick up more of the political subtleties when I watch American news, but the British newscasters seemed to be taking the job of war reporting more seriously than their American counterparts.

The televised nudity was the fun part. Keith and I watched a show about three couples who were competing to come up with the most original wedding with the help of wedding planners. One of the couples was a nudist couple, and the groom shed all of his clothes in at least three scenes. Full frontal, just standing there delivering his lines. It was not at all prurient, just very funny. I've never seen anything like it in America, even on cable.

Advertising, too. While we were on our bus tour (coming up on Sunday), Ellie snapped this photo of a billboard in downtown London promoting a sports drink.

Day Five: Back to London