(no subject)
Great London day.
Highlights included:
--learning the history of the various buildings of Westminster Abbey (Edward the Confessor laying the foundations, Henry III adding in the French Gothic style by bringing stones from France, Henry VII's Tudor-rose post-civil-war additions, the various burnings of the Houses of parliament in the early 1500s, 1834, and the Blitz, the ransacked Jewel House, the memorial to the abolitionists Wilberforce etc, eighteenth-century pike-snuffing trumpets and fan windows, the bomb-proof Church House aka the Queen's "peculiar", Martin Luther King at the exit)
--Trooping the Colour, including an airshow with white/red/blue smoke trails
--Trafalgar Square's Nelson column and gorgeous (if hilariously nationalistic and hero-worshipping) bronze panels of his major battles: St. Vincent (1797), the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), and Trafalgar (1805), where he's shown dying over the caption ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY
--Issac D'Israeli's house
--Samuel Johnson's house, in its tiny labyrinthine complex hidden between financial buildings north of Fleet Street
--India House (not the South Sea House, sorry Mr. Lamb)
--Regent's Square
--Bloomsbury Square and its hilarious statue of Charles Fox
--the Theatre district, appropriately with its Siddon House, Garrick Street, Dryden Street, Byron pub, Kean Street, and Sheridan gardens
--a huge parade of naked bicyclers riding through the London School of Economics
--the fountain court at Somerset House (former home to the Stamp Office and Navy Office) and current home to Ai Wei's "Circle of Animals"
--And finally this sunset. A sky like a heart with a light in its rooms, pink glow smudged downward by a soft lead pull of rain; and to the east, like the breath after omega, clouds palming quietly apart.
Highlights included:
--learning the history of the various buildings of Westminster Abbey (Edward the Confessor laying the foundations, Henry III adding in the French Gothic style by bringing stones from France, Henry VII's Tudor-rose post-civil-war additions, the various burnings of the Houses of parliament in the early 1500s, 1834, and the Blitz, the ransacked Jewel House, the memorial to the abolitionists Wilberforce etc, eighteenth-century pike-snuffing trumpets and fan windows, the bomb-proof Church House aka the Queen's "peculiar", Martin Luther King at the exit)
--Trooping the Colour, including an airshow with white/red/blue smoke trails
--Trafalgar Square's Nelson column and gorgeous (if hilariously nationalistic and hero-worshipping) bronze panels of his major battles: St. Vincent (1797), the Nile (1798), Copenhagen (1801), and Trafalgar (1805), where he's shown dying over the caption ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY
--Issac D'Israeli's house
--Samuel Johnson's house, in its tiny labyrinthine complex hidden between financial buildings north of Fleet Street
--India House (not the South Sea House, sorry Mr. Lamb)
--Regent's Square
--Bloomsbury Square and its hilarious statue of Charles Fox
--the Theatre district, appropriately with its Siddon House, Garrick Street, Dryden Street, Byron pub, Kean Street, and Sheridan gardens
--a huge parade of naked bicyclers riding through the London School of Economics
--the fountain court at Somerset House (former home to the Stamp Office and Navy Office) and current home to Ai Wei's "Circle of Animals"
--And finally this sunset. A sky like a heart with a light in its rooms, pink glow smudged downward by a soft lead pull of rain; and to the east, like the breath after omega, clouds palming quietly apart.