Beginning the London Pass
I'm taking a break from archiving and joining Joren on some sightseeing and museuming.
Kew Gardens had the distinction of inaugurating our London Passes. Jor and I walked down the road a few paces and entered the Royal Botanical Gardens. When you are faced with 533 acres of royally cultivated beauty and only 3 hours of viewing pleasure, where do you go first? Why, the answer is: the King and Queen’s Summer Palace.
Kew Palace. Home to King George the Third (erroneously called Mad) and Queen Charlotte and their fourteen children. Home to others as well, but the palace’s décor was restored to George and Charlotte’s era. This was particularly of interest to me, since most of my British research takes place during King George’s reign, in the late eighteenth century.
Following Kew Palace, we toured the rock gardens briefly, and then launched into the larger botanical acreage. A flower here, a tree there, two or three hothouses devoted to lilies or tropical flowers or a temperate zone and suddenly we were climbing a metal staircase to a treetop view of the gardens.
We spent far too long (and not nearly enough time) in the Gardens, so that by the time we reached our next stop, the Tower of London, it was already 3pm. The tourist crowds in the Tower complex were overwhelming, especially for the Crown Jewels, which is where we headed first. After our automated sidewalk tour of the King and Queen’s coronation crowns and the four ton golden serving set, we began the lengthy process of viewing the various castles walls and greens, the armory and artillery keep, the museum to the Royal Fusiliers, the crows and guards and imprisonment and execution chambers and the three hundred year old graffiti carved in stone proclaiming the names and religious affiliations for those held in contempt of the crown.
England’s history is so much more sordid than our own. I suppose we might all be enchanted by other people’s stories, but there seems to be something incredibly unbelievable about the intrigues, cruelties, mass murderings and assassinations that follow the British crown. It was as if our whole human schematic was illustrated within those walls, the full capacity for love and hate, violence and control and generosity and gentility could be viewed in the space of a few stones.
After our Tower of London tour, we were right next to Tower Bridge and decided to walk across. We were too late to go up to the top, we’d do that another day, and instead we just walked over to the South Side bank. Joren collected some sand, which was actually mostly shale, shell and strangely, bones.
The next two hours we wandered around trying to find dinner. Turns out that the center of London, while rife with historical monuments and statues and buildings, does not cater to the after six dinner crowd. So Joren and I took the tube from the South end of Tower Bridge up to St James’s Park and then walked to Westminster, over to Green Park, then finally asked a guard at the Methodist Church where we might find a bite of food. He directed us way over to Leicester Square, which was past Trafalgar. The whole journey took probably an hour and a half, but we eventually made it into a British pub still serving food.
Kew Gardens had the distinction of inaugurating our London Passes. Jor and I walked down the road a few paces and entered the Royal Botanical Gardens. When you are faced with 533 acres of royally cultivated beauty and only 3 hours of viewing pleasure, where do you go first? Why, the answer is: the King and Queen’s Summer Palace.
Kew Palace. Home to King George the Third (erroneously called Mad) and Queen Charlotte and their fourteen children. Home to others as well, but the palace’s décor was restored to George and Charlotte’s era. This was particularly of interest to me, since most of my British research takes place during King George’s reign, in the late eighteenth century.
Following Kew Palace, we toured the rock gardens briefly, and then launched into the larger botanical acreage. A flower here, a tree there, two or three hothouses devoted to lilies or tropical flowers or a temperate zone and suddenly we were climbing a metal staircase to a treetop view of the gardens.
We spent far too long (and not nearly enough time) in the Gardens, so that by the time we reached our next stop, the Tower of London, it was already 3pm. The tourist crowds in the Tower complex were overwhelming, especially for the Crown Jewels, which is where we headed first. After our automated sidewalk tour of the King and Queen’s coronation crowns and the four ton golden serving set, we began the lengthy process of viewing the various castles walls and greens, the armory and artillery keep, the museum to the Royal Fusiliers, the crows and guards and imprisonment and execution chambers and the three hundred year old graffiti carved in stone proclaiming the names and religious affiliations for those held in contempt of the crown.
England’s history is so much more sordid than our own. I suppose we might all be enchanted by other people’s stories, but there seems to be something incredibly unbelievable about the intrigues, cruelties, mass murderings and assassinations that follow the British crown. It was as if our whole human schematic was illustrated within those walls, the full capacity for love and hate, violence and control and generosity and gentility could be viewed in the space of a few stones.
After our Tower of London tour, we were right next to Tower Bridge and decided to walk across. We were too late to go up to the top, we’d do that another day, and instead we just walked over to the South Side bank. Joren collected some sand, which was actually mostly shale, shell and strangely, bones.
The next two hours we wandered around trying to find dinner. Turns out that the center of London, while rife with historical monuments and statues and buildings, does not cater to the after six dinner crowd. So Joren and I took the tube from the South end of Tower Bridge up to St James’s Park and then walked to Westminster, over to Green Park, then finally asked a guard at the Methodist Church where we might find a bite of food. He directed us way over to Leicester Square, which was past Trafalgar. The whole journey took probably an hour and a half, but we eventually made it into a British pub still serving food.
i like your necklace! very nice to follow you here. will have to talk very soon. how long will you be in england? i thought two weeks.
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