Curiosities in London
Nov. 23rd, 2002 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaToday a friend and I went for a walk in London.
We both own copies of Andrew Duncan's "Walking London" (a book of short walks, plentifully supplied with pubs and Interesting Things To Look At), so decided we'd test drive a couple of them.
The Inns of Court walk has a big note at the beginning of the book saying "it's important to do this walk on a weekday, the Inns are shut on weekends". Which neither of us noticed - until we discovered most of the Inns were all closed up. Extra kudos to Lincoln's Inn for looking like it was open, letting us walk all the way through it, then sneakily having the "out" locked at the other end, causing us to retrace our steps completely.So I'm not sure we really followed the route, more sort of walked near it, round it, and intersected it occasionally.
Which was interesting in its own way. That whole area of London is such a morass of different architectural styles that I'm quite happily entertained just walking round it looking at the buildings.
We passed the Old Curiosity Shop, which was monumentally disappointing. It has "immortalised by Charles Dickens" painted across its front, and was all shuttered up. The window had odd shoes in it, and peering through the shutters suggested that inside was more or less empty.
Unfortunately, Dave forgot to book us nice weather, and somewhere in the vicinity of Lincoln's Inn Square, someone dropped a small lake on us. Fortuitously, we were passing the Sir John Soane's museum at the time, which is fantastic.
Soane was an architect (he designed a few minor things like the Bank of England), and during his lifetime opened his house as a public museum, and stipulated that on his death it should be kept "as nearly as possible in the state in which he shall leave it".
So it's a house. Full of stuff. Bucketloads of architectural drawings and models, like you might expect, but also...
The alabaster sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I
Several complete sets of Hogarth paintings
Scale replicas of Etruscan tombs
Lovely wooden furniture
Carved marble figures/busts/fragments...
The house itself, which has all sorts of unusual features added on
(If you're the sort of person who gets irate about Victorians blatantly pinching stuff from Greece/Italy/Egypt/etc, probably best you stay away :)
And by the time we came out it had even stopped raining.
We managed to get sufficiently far into Inner Temple to get to the Templars' Church, which is open on Saturdays, but it had joined in the conspiracy against us, and was shut for BBC filming. (Anyone know of what ?)
I guess this is a nice walk, but really don't do it at the weekend.
The Bankside and Southwark walk was rather less shut that the other one, which was a good start. We happened to be passing the Tate Modern at the beginning, so I insisted we went in as I wanted to look at the Big Red Thing again. It's still big, red and incredibly impressive. I'm not usually much of a fan of the abstract shape school of sculpture; usually I look at something and think "Hmm. Nice shape. So what?".
But Marsyas is great. The way the light shines through it produces some truly amazing effects, different depending on where you're standing in relation to it. The not-quite-opaque membrane it's made from, and the support struts running through it like veins, gives the whole thing a surprisingly organic quality; as you walk round it and the angles shift, you can almost imagine it's breathing...
I think it is, you know. Because they don't prevent people from touching it, most people have made the same discovery I did, that if you slap it, it reverberates. Not quickly, but with a slow, steady whhumm.............whhumm............ Standing under the centre section it's noticeable that the whole structure is humming gently. I tend to be very aware of the space around me, and it's quite astounding how the sense of space changes depending on how close you are to it.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, try here, for some rather more coherent art criticism.
Anyway, this walk... We looked at the Globe theatre, which looks surprisingly (and slightly disappointingly) clean and scale-model like. We tried to look at the excavations of the Rose theatre. We followed the AA signs. We met dead ends, and nothing looking remotely like a dig. We checked what the book had to say, followed its directions, ended up in a dead end (which had been enticingly named "Rose Alley"). Eventually we read the small print in the book, and discovered that the excavations are actually within an office block - and they've blacked out the windows to stop you peering through. Dunno what's going on there.
Lots more things to look at (the replica Golden Hinde, the ruins of Winchester Palace, the site of the Clink prison..). And, ex-Refraction players please note, I have now been into Southwark cathedral. It's airy, light, and not at all full of Tzimisce ick :)
Nice pint of London Pride in a pub with the unlikely name of "The Horniman at Hays", then past some more weird arsed architecture on the river bank, and over Tower Bridge to the station home.
Quite an interesting walk, actually - though as ever it's disappointing how many things are just marked "Site of the <something old/famous/interesting>", and appear to be mundane office blocks.
We both own copies of Andrew Duncan's "Walking London" (a book of short walks, plentifully supplied with pubs and Interesting Things To Look At), so decided we'd test drive a couple of them.
The Inns of Court walk has a big note at the beginning of the book saying "it's important to do this walk on a weekday, the Inns are shut on weekends". Which neither of us noticed - until we discovered most of the Inns were all closed up. Extra kudos to Lincoln's Inn for looking like it was open, letting us walk all the way through it, then sneakily having the "out" locked at the other end, causing us to retrace our steps completely.So I'm not sure we really followed the route, more sort of walked near it, round it, and intersected it occasionally.
Which was interesting in its own way. That whole area of London is such a morass of different architectural styles that I'm quite happily entertained just walking round it looking at the buildings.
We passed the Old Curiosity Shop, which was monumentally disappointing. It has "immortalised by Charles Dickens" painted across its front, and was all shuttered up. The window had odd shoes in it, and peering through the shutters suggested that inside was more or less empty.
Unfortunately, Dave forgot to book us nice weather, and somewhere in the vicinity of Lincoln's Inn Square, someone dropped a small lake on us. Fortuitously, we were passing the Sir John Soane's museum at the time, which is fantastic.
Soane was an architect (he designed a few minor things like the Bank of England), and during his lifetime opened his house as a public museum, and stipulated that on his death it should be kept "as nearly as possible in the state in which he shall leave it".
So it's a house. Full of stuff. Bucketloads of architectural drawings and models, like you might expect, but also...
The alabaster sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I
Several complete sets of Hogarth paintings
Scale replicas of Etruscan tombs
Lovely wooden furniture
Carved marble figures/busts/fragments...
The house itself, which has all sorts of unusual features added on
(If you're the sort of person who gets irate about Victorians blatantly pinching stuff from Greece/Italy/Egypt/etc, probably best you stay away :)
And by the time we came out it had even stopped raining.
We managed to get sufficiently far into Inner Temple to get to the Templars' Church, which is open on Saturdays, but it had joined in the conspiracy against us, and was shut for BBC filming. (Anyone know of what ?)
I guess this is a nice walk, but really don't do it at the weekend.
The Bankside and Southwark walk was rather less shut that the other one, which was a good start. We happened to be passing the Tate Modern at the beginning, so I insisted we went in as I wanted to look at the Big Red Thing again. It's still big, red and incredibly impressive. I'm not usually much of a fan of the abstract shape school of sculpture; usually I look at something and think "Hmm. Nice shape. So what?".
But Marsyas is great. The way the light shines through it produces some truly amazing effects, different depending on where you're standing in relation to it. The not-quite-opaque membrane it's made from, and the support struts running through it like veins, gives the whole thing a surprisingly organic quality; as you walk round it and the angles shift, you can almost imagine it's breathing...
I think it is, you know. Because they don't prevent people from touching it, most people have made the same discovery I did, that if you slap it, it reverberates. Not quickly, but with a slow, steady whhumm.............whhumm............ Standing under the centre section it's noticeable that the whole structure is humming gently. I tend to be very aware of the space around me, and it's quite astounding how the sense of space changes depending on how close you are to it.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, try here, for some rather more coherent art criticism.
Anyway, this walk... We looked at the Globe theatre, which looks surprisingly (and slightly disappointingly) clean and scale-model like. We tried to look at the excavations of the Rose theatre. We followed the AA signs. We met dead ends, and nothing looking remotely like a dig. We checked what the book had to say, followed its directions, ended up in a dead end (which had been enticingly named "Rose Alley"). Eventually we read the small print in the book, and discovered that the excavations are actually within an office block - and they've blacked out the windows to stop you peering through. Dunno what's going on there.
Lots more things to look at (the replica Golden Hinde, the ruins of Winchester Palace, the site of the Clink prison..). And, ex-Refraction players please note, I have now been into Southwark cathedral. It's airy, light, and not at all full of Tzimisce ick :)
Nice pint of London Pride in a pub with the unlikely name of "The Horniman at Hays", then past some more weird arsed architecture on the river bank, and over Tower Bridge to the station home.
Quite an interesting walk, actually - though as ever it's disappointing how many things are just marked "Site of the <something old/famous/interesting>", and appear to be mundane office blocks.
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Date: 2002-11-25 02:26 am (UTC)We managed to get sufficiently far into Inner Temple to get to the Templars' Church, which is open on Saturdays, but it had joined in the conspiracy against us, and was shut for BBC filming.
If you do ever make it into the Temple Church, say "hi" to Robin the Chaplain.
Yes, this is my claim to Conpiracy Theory fame.