So that's it?
One of the annoyances on my last trip to London was that I walked from the Tate Modern to the Elephant and Castle roundabout looking for the Michael Faraday Memorial and couldn't find it. No plaque or concrete statue in sight anywhere. There was a huge steel casing there that looked like a fancy covering for some industrial eyesore like air conditioning compressors or electrical stuff. I walked around it a couple times and then walked up the street to see if it was misplaced on the guidebook I had. Nothing there either.
The sun had completely gone down when I left. I was tired from the long walk, which had a side trip diversion to find the Cross Bones cemetery in Southwark on the way. Cross Bones was also marked wrong, which had me wandering around a private school grounds around dinnertime until a guy came around to ask what I was looking for. He never heard of Cross Bones, so I walked up the street until I found the cemetery (a fenced off barren lot with trinkets and talismans tied to the chain link gates) a block north of the school.
Both of those I picked out because I saw them on the guidebook map, but it added frustration to a long day where I was getting a cold. I came across a link for the Memorial today and it turns out that big blocky unmarked industrial covering was the Memorial after all. WTF? It's appropriate that a memorial for the pioneer of electricity & electronics covers the electrical transformers for London Underground Northern Line, but it's seriously lacking on the *memorial* part.
Photo: http://ornamentalpassions.blogspot.com/2008/09/faraday-monument-elephant-castle-se1.html
I was reminded of this today after watching the Parkour Generations video "City Gents" where the underground ramps and shopping center felt like Elephant and Castle to me. (I chased a bus two blocks from Broad to Long today, which is why I ended up watching parkour videos.) There were also parkour videos training at Pochi when there was the Parkour Horizons international expo that brought the Parkour Generations from London to Columbus.
So I shouldn't fault my guidebook (Not For Tourists London) for that slight. Except the Cross Bones misprint and a post office on Poland St that had moved, it was extremely helpful. Fitting _every_ street in London with painstaking detail, listing all the banks/ATMs, restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, libraries and odd places into a small paperback book is quite an accomplishment. It get me all the way across town at night to Brick Lane/Banglatown where I was enjoying fresh bagels out of the oven around midnight at two 24 hour bagel shops and less enjoying the drunken over-talkative Scot kicking over the heads of people sitting on the sidewalk.
The sun had completely gone down when I left. I was tired from the long walk, which had a side trip diversion to find the Cross Bones cemetery in Southwark on the way. Cross Bones was also marked wrong, which had me wandering around a private school grounds around dinnertime until a guy came around to ask what I was looking for. He never heard of Cross Bones, so I walked up the street until I found the cemetery (a fenced off barren lot with trinkets and talismans tied to the chain link gates) a block north of the school.
Both of those I picked out because I saw them on the guidebook map, but it added frustration to a long day where I was getting a cold. I came across a link for the Memorial today and it turns out that big blocky unmarked industrial covering was the Memorial after all. WTF? It's appropriate that a memorial for the pioneer of electricity & electronics covers the electrical transformers for London Underground Northern Line, but it's seriously lacking on the *memorial* part.
Photo: http://ornamentalpassions.blogspot.com/2008/09/faraday-monument-elephant-castle-se1.html
I was reminded of this today after watching the Parkour Generations video "City Gents" where the underground ramps and shopping center felt like Elephant and Castle to me. (I chased a bus two blocks from Broad to Long today, which is why I ended up watching parkour videos.) There were also parkour videos training at Pochi when there was the Parkour Horizons international expo that brought the Parkour Generations from London to Columbus.
So I shouldn't fault my guidebook (Not For Tourists London) for that slight. Except the Cross Bones misprint and a post office on Poland St that had moved, it was extremely helpful. Fitting _every_ street in London with painstaking detail, listing all the banks/ATMs, restaurants, supermarkets, pharmacies, libraries and odd places into a small paperback book is quite an accomplishment. It get me all the way across town at night to Brick Lane/Banglatown where I was enjoying fresh bagels out of the oven around midnight at two 24 hour bagel shops and less enjoying the drunken over-talkative Scot kicking over the heads of people sitting on the sidewalk.