Our hotel, the Vintry and Mercer, is small but extremely comfortable and rather stylish. We slept until after 9 and had a nice breakfast in the hotel restaurant to start the day.
Let me get this out of my system right away: Lizzie has a lot of nerve, planning her 70-Year Jubilee just when we were in London. Central London was bizarre: whole roads blocked off, teeming crowds trying to get a glimpse of a royal (although, on this second day of the Jubilee, two royals were conspicuously absent: the queen herself, who, at 96, understandably felt a bit of “discomfort” after the first day of the celebration, and Prince Andrew, who pleaded a Corona Virus infection but whose “discomfort” certainly stems from his status as a royal scumbag); other parts of town that would normally be busy were totally deserted.
We walked up through the series of narrow, twisting alleys that characterize the City, which is simultaneously the oldest and, with the ongoing construction of massive skyscrapers, the newest part of London. One of the most delightful things in this part of town are the sudden glimpses of St. Paul’s that come out of nowhere.
We popped into a couple of Christopher Wren churches along the way, reaching a kind of high point with St. Mary Le Bow, the Wren church with the highest steeple besides St. Paul’s Cathedral.
After the great fire of London that utterly destroyed large parts of the city center in 1666, the King commissioned his friend Wren to rebuild the city’s churches. He designed at least part of 50 churches, of which 23 still stand today. Many of these surround St. Paul’s. Our friends Lucy and Andrew Dechet were married in one of these…giving them all special meaning!
Arriving at St. Paul’s the huge crowd was packed so tightly that one could barely move—the whole royal family was in the church for the main Jubilee service, after which the bunch of them, including, to the surprise of many Londoners, Harry and Meghan, would walk down Cheapside to the Guildhall. This picture of the old Temple Gate (also by Wren) gives a sense of the security measures evident throughout London.
The Gate was built by Wren in 1672 at Temple Bar to mark the passage into the City from Westminster; there was once an actual bar that had to be lifted before one could pass through. By the late 19th century, though, increased traffic and impinging construction led to the gate’s disassembly; it was rebuilt to ornament the rural estate of a brewery owner. The gate’s 2,700 stones were brought back to The City only in 2004 and rebuilt at the edge of Paternoster Square, with St. Paul’s directly behind.
We strolled west, first down Fleet Street (finding that one of my favorite London churches, the Temple Church, built as the headquarters of the Knights Templar in 1185, was closed until after the Jubilee) and then its continuation, the Strand. Sue has fond memories of High Tea with her sister Cathy and niece Ariel at the Savoy.
Sue had hoped that one of her favorite things to do—a noontime concert at St. Martin’s in the Fields—was somehow compatible with our 1:30 PM tickets to the huge Raphael show at the National Gallery. But that wasn’t to be. The show itself is massive and spectacular, with loans from seemingly every major museum in the world. It is hard to imagine that so many major works will be shown together anytime soon. There is a particular emphasis on Raphael as draftsman and the relations of the drawings to the major paintings, which works very, very well. But the main show is of course Raphael’s painting…seeing so many madonnas and holy families together was deeply moving. What an experience!
Although we were feeling a bit jetlagged and sore of foot, we couldn’t resist revisiting some of our favorite galleries in this great museum. We don’t know of any great museum that is as friendly and as accessible as the National Gallery. Perched smack in the middle of the West End, your path often brings you to Trafalgar, and, since there is no admission charge, it is easy to simply pop in and do some targeted viewing. The medieval and renaissance collections are remarkable, with exquisite works by Duccio, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Giorgione…to name only my own favorites. And it was here that I discovered, pretty late in the game, two of my favorite painters, Veronese and Poussin. I owe those discoveries to the privilege of listening to the great art historian T.J. Clark talk about some key works.
It was getting late in the day, but we wanted to walk off our “museum legs” and headed for Admiralty Arch at the other end of the the square. There is almost always something fun in Trafalgar.
But our plan to walk through St. James Park, one of our favorite places, ran afoul of the Jubilee. Much of the Mall, a broad thoroughfare that runs alongside the park from Buckingham Palace to the Arch, was cordoned off, presumably because the royals had made their way along it toward the city. And we literally saw little of the park itself: every square inch seemed covered by picnic blankets or unprotected bottoms, as Jubileee revealers took advantage of the holiday.
Once across the park and into the deliriously named street Petty France, we decided that a ride on a red double decker was just the thing for us. Our grandson Nathaniel is an aficionado of the London buses, and we had promised to bring him video evidence of our bus adventures. It is a good long ride from central London to Fulham, just right for tired legs. And so we jumped off in the center of Fulham, very ready for an evening at a place that is high on our short list of favorite restaurants (full list on request): the Harwood Arms, the king of gastropubs.
We started coming here soon after it opened, and no trip to London is complete without a meal here. The menu centers around game, much of it shot by the chef himself. Over the years, the food has become more refined, influenced by the cuisine of its sister restaurant, The Ledbury, one of London’s best French establishments. As wonderful as the new dishes are, though, I do occasionally miss the rusticity of the earlier menus, with huge haunches of venison on wooden trenchers accompanied by mounds of vegetables and puréed celeriac.
Here’s the menu. Sue went all fish, with a special of raw bream served like a carne cruda and stream trout. I had the warm duck salad and, naturally, the venison. Pretty heavenly.
Sorry for the food porn.
The number 11 bus brought us back into town and a well deserved late evening…of blogging, for you, dear readers!