So we’re off to London, our home away from home. Most normal people seeking relaxation go to…the Caribbean, or Mexico, or, God help us, Florida, but not the Jennings. Flanerie, museums, theater, and the odd gastropub are just the ticket for us. Up bright and early tomorrow, morning flight to Heathrow, and before you can say Bob’s your uncle we’ll be in dreamland in our hotel in Covent Garden.
Stay tuned!
I’m a fan of the morning fight to London (while Sue needs some convincing). You get up really early (4:45 AM in our case) and when you arrive in London, say at 8 PM, you’re already on your way to dreamland–with no jet lag the next day!. We couldn’t have had an easier time of it: plane on time, relatively comfortable seats (even in steerage). and an early arrival. We were at our hotel by 9:30.
The Londoner is the nicest hotel we’ve stayed at for several years. it is London’s newest hotel, and the definition of a big city hostelry: at the southern end of Leicester Square, the lobbies and restaurants all have a lively hum.
Our room (a complimentary upgrade) was actually spacious, with a seating area and a large bath area.
Sue has yet to try the pool, and I’m yet to try the dedicated whisky bar, but that is coming.
The hotel’s (many) restaurants had stopped taking orders by the time we came down after settling in, so we plunged into Soho and at a small, very modern Japanese restaurant called Yatay.
We had a very nice meal: tuna shashimi, pork buns, Monkfish for Sue and lamb loin for me.
Back in our room at 11, we managed to make it until 1:30 London time, or 8:30 EST, and then slept like bears.
I made good decision for a change: booking our room through a special Amex program cost $100 more per night, but included the room upgrade, breakfast for two, and s $150 food and beverage credit (to say nothing of a bottle of delicious English bubbly (yes, they make terrific sparkling wine in Kent). When we found out that the breakfast buffet cost a wobbly-making 39 quid…we had a winner. It was a great buffet, but it tasted better for the price.
We headed out on a mission. Sue’s brother Tom had inherited a lovely gold pocket watch from his grandfather and Sue had discovered that it had been produced by a well-known watchmaker in London. And we were deputized to carry the watch to its maker. Steps from the hotel, though, we encountered the theater at which “Good,” a play with David Tennant (think Broadchurch), was playing; we had tried to nab some seats online, but it was totally sold out. The box office, though, had two for the Saturday matinee; we’ll report.
Tickets in hand, we crossed Haymarket and began a stroll through St. James, one of the stateliest, quietest, and loveliest sections of central London. The offices of Charles Frodsham Co., Ltd., are on Bury Street, not far off St. James Square. Frodsham is the oldest continuously operating firm of watchmakers in the world; they began producing chronometers, both marine chronometers for navies around the world and chronometers for daily use, in 1831. We aren’t watch collectors, but these are very beautiful objects.
We spoke with Richard Stenning, one of the current owners and a watchmaker in his own right, who examined the watch carefully. Charles Frodsham had remained in family hands until 1921; in the last century it has had only four further owners
.Tom’s watch had been produced in 1871 (every watch is handmade and engraved with a serial number) and fell in the middle of the chronometer production (an elite version was very fancy indeed). Richard found the watch to be in excellent condition; the main movement as well as a stopwatch function still worked. We won’t know the actual condition of the watch until it is opened in Frodsham’s workshop and further examined, but we’re hopeful that they can clean it and get it running again for a reasonable cost.
Speaking of reasonable costs, you can get on the waiting list for one of Frodsham’s wrist watches; they make 12 per year for a price of 100,000 pounds sterling.
Excursus only for geeks who have read Dave Sobel’s Longitude. Frodsham’s produced now-famous reconstructions of John Harrison’s H3 and H4 marine timekeepers, the instruments that allowed Harrison for the first time to measure longitude with great accuracy. Here are H3 and H4 in all their glory. The photo of H3 at the top is Frodsham’s reconstruction; the photo of H4 shows the actual watch, held at the Royal Museums in Greenwich.
Now for those of you whose eyes haven’t glazed over, the walk did continue. We walked down Pall Mall and paused when Pall Mall meets Regent Street, Waterloo Place. This is the site of the Duke of York Column.
An interesting bit of trivia: the Duke had reorganized and modernized the British army and was much beloved by the ranks; on his death, every soldier voluntarily forfeited a day’s wages and the proceeds, some £21,000 (equivalent to £1,934,155 in 2021), went into the monument for the Duke. The “Grand Old Duke of York” certainly has a fine view of St. James Park, but he can only glimpse the London Eye
The pedestrian on the eastern end of the Mall is passes through Admiralty Arch (this picture is for you, Nathaniel!), before emerging in Trafalgar Square.
After brief stops to check the musical offerings at St. Martins in the Fields and get new British SIM cards, we had a coffee at a nice cafe and then headed back to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery.
We had purchased tickets for the huge Winslow Homer show, which proved to be much more interesting than I could have imagined. Much of his early work is concerned with issues of race and violence in the period after the Civil War, while much of his mature work captures moments of danger and transience in the human encounter with nature. Who knew?
The Renaissance wing was closed, as were lots of smaller galleries; I can only assume that they continue to have severe staff shortages. We visited some of our old friends that we return to every visit: the Duccios, Pieros, Titians, and Veroneses stand out even this company.
As our jet lagged legs were growing a bit weary, we trotted the very short distance back to our hotel for a bit of restoration. One of the nicest features of The Londoner is a lounge on the mezzanine that is limited to residents; they serve free coffee, tea, and nibbles, and have a full bar. We made use of the Resident’s Lounge every day.
The hotel runs a Japanese izakaya bar on its top floor, and we had a lovely meal with sashimi, king prawns, sea bass carpaccio, and lobster gyoza tacos. For dessert we indulged in our admittedly childish passion for riding around on the red double decker buses! After running around in circles looking for the 14 (which, it turned out, had been diverted from just where we were looking). we found it on Regent Street and rode through the Christmas lights on Regent and Oxford streets, around Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner, past a blazing Harrod’s, and through South Kensington and Chelsea on our way to Fulham.
Back at the hotel, I made it an all-Japanese night with a Nikki whisky…and there were are!
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Is there such a thing as too relaxed? Even my sleep-resistant wife awoke suddenly at 9AM.
We decided to start the day with a little granddaughter shopping. And where else to search for the finest for our finest, Viv and Iggles? Harrod’s of course! We didn’t wait long for our first bus of the day…but some beginnings are deceptive. We were soon dodging our way past the solitary but oh so well heeled shoppers at the Knightsbridge glitter emporium. The store has almost as little signage as Princeton used to (if you have to ask, you don’t belong), but here the intent is different: you are supposed to be adrift among the gleaming jewelry and alluringly ticking watches. We finally found our way to the children’s floor. We were of course tempted by the £2000 jumpsuits for the little princesses, but we finally succumbed to some rather special toys for the girls. Toys, by the way, sure to turn their parents’ hair prematurely gray. Stay tuned.
After so much consumer culture, we desperately needed the antidote, some culture culture. We again didn’t wait long for our bus, but then the reality hit us, as the traffic was not just snarled but utterly resistant to any movement. TUBE STRIKE! The effects of a tube strike on London traffic are not for the faint of heart. Hordes of people who would normally have sailed along underground were now sitting in their cars in central London…for hours on end! Riding the red buses is a joy when one isn’t in a hurry and has no real destination; as actual transportation, they’re treacly. Without the tube, London becomes a quagmire. Our first bus crawled slowly toward Hyde Park Corner and then came to a very long stop as traffic was halted for two carriages (one carrying what looked like the Saudi Ambassador) emerged from Buckingham Palace Gardens. Once “underway,” it halted prematurely at Piccadilly Circus…for no announced reason. So we hoofed it down to Trafalgar to get the next bus toward the Tate Modern. The wait was interminable, but, after ten weeks in the damned orthopedic boot, my knees are a mess, and the walk didn’t appeal. It finally took us 90 minutes to go from Knightsbridge to St. Paul’s!
The walk across the Millennium Bridge is always a highlight, even on a gray day like today.
We were soon having a warming bite in the Tate Modern cafe. And then it was on to something remarkable: a huge Cezanne show. We’ve seen a lot of Cezanne’s, but this one, that assembled virtually every major work from around the world, taught us an enormous amount. One of the features of the show was Cezanne’s importance for other artists, and the paintings belonging to other artists (from Picasso to Jasper Johns) were all noted. What a privilege to see so many great pictures together, and organized so coherently. Some of you might remember that this painting of a boy was once the first thing you saw when you entered the permanent collection at MOMA.
All too soon it was time to face the horrors of the return journey. The first bus wasn’t too late and didn’t move too slowly, but the second bus, from Waterloo, took forever to arrive and then was halted, according to the driver, for “security reasons.” We finally made it back to the hotel…in one piece.
We had reservations at a well-regarded gastropub, The Baring, in Islington. And we started out gamely, though we feared the worst. A cab was out of the question. We hadn’t seen a single black cab with its light on all day, and the concierge at our hotel told us that a colleague had waited in Piccadilly Circus, normally awash in cabs, for almost an hour to no avail. So we walked up Charing Cross Road, hoping to take the bus to the pub. But the buses were so late and so full that they just sailed by our stop…with the result that we had to cancel our reservation. The gentleman at the pub was understanding…he feared that this would be the order of the day.
We decided to retreat to one of the bars at the hotel to rethink our options. I had already had a chat with one of the concierges, a very nice chap from Bruges. I asked him for a recommendation, and he pointed us to an Italian in St. James; we had a glass of Kentish bubbly in one of the hotel lounges while he got us a table. That took a lot of the sting out of our gastropub disappointment!
It turned out that the restaurant, O’ver St. James, was very close, but across Haymarket in St. James, and thus a good bit more sedate than the throbbing scene around Leicester Square. It proved to be a terrific recommendation: the food was delicious (we shared a selection of Naples street food accompanied by the best focaccia I’ve ever had; Sue had a Sicilian ravioli dish while I had squash blossom risotto; all washed down with a lovely Etna Rosso), the staff warm and accommodating (our captain’s family was from near Lucca in Tuscany, but he was born in London). I derive a silly pleasure from a well-run restaurant, and this was definitely that.
To cap off the night, we dove into the Christmas market in Leicester Square.
The tradition of the Christmas market has spread out from Germany to the rest of Europe, but this one, at least, has little to do with Christmas or its spirit. It is in essence a colossal space for selling alcohol and fried food. But, even here, we encountered culture.
Although the show playing at “The Paradiso,” “La Clique,” may seem like just another girlie show (the billboard reads in part “Fire-Nudity-Flashing Lights-Body Contortion) it is a holdover from the nineteenth century circus, which included sideshows like this one. Seurat captured one in a famous painting, Parade de cirque.
And now, dear reader, having survived the one-day tube strike, I’m blogging for you.
We started the day with a nice stroll through Covent Garden; although the small, twisting lanes around the Covent Garden Market are filled with boutiques, they are still charming. We have very pleasant memories of shopping here with Sarah, in search of the perfect coat, when she was on Junior Year at University College London.
The covered market is always fun. For all of you Where’s Waldo fans, can you spot Sue in this picture?
Although I can’t upload a video, we did film a tightrope walker who was strung between the pillars in the portico of St. Paul’s Church (1633), the first church built in England after the reformation, and designed by Inigo Jones (architect of some of the most beloved buildings in England, including the Banqueting House in Whitehall and the Queen’s House in Greenwich–for which see below).
From the market it was a short walk down to the river and the Victoria Embankment Gardens, from which we walked along the river toward Embankment Pier and our boat for the trip to Greenwich.
One of the crew members, a young working class guy with a sharp wit, gave us some commentary as we went along, mostly directed at the new money along the river. The buildings along the river are an inimitable mix of the old, the new, and the ill conceived. Some of the newer skyscrapers in the City of London loom over the river; you can just see the top of Norman Foster’s Gherkin rising into the gap in the middle.
For those who don’t know it, here is the Gherkin–proper name 30 St. Mary Axe– shorn of its surroundings.
Below you’ll see a new commercial complex; the tower in the background is the Shard, said to be the tallest building in Europe.
Once past tower bridge, the Thames swings sharply south around the enormous financial development called Canary Wharf.
The boat sets you down in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The Tudors had a large palace at Greenwich; both of Henry VIII’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were born here. This palace fell into gradual disrepair, and Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, commissioned Inigo Jones to build an edifice now known as the Queen’s House.
This comparatively modest structure, completed in 1633, was the first consciously classical building to be built in England.
The Queen’s house soon became the focal point of a much larger complex. In 1694 King William III and Queen Mary II chartered the construction of a Royal Hospital for Seamen. The hospital was built between 1696 and 1712 to designs by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. The first image is the vista from the river up toward the Queen’s House. The second is from the top of the complex looking back to the river.
The wren domes frame Canary Wharf other neatly. In naming these buildings a World Heritage site, UNESCO described the Old Seaman’s Hospital as “the finest and most dramatically sited architectural and landscape ensemble in the British Isles.”
The complex includes two famous interiors. The first is called the “Painted Hall,” painted between 1707 and 1726 by Sir James Thornhill. The hall was closed because filming was underway for the Netflix series Bridgerton–with lots of folks looking rather self-conscious as they ran around in period dress. But it looks like this.
The second interior is the chapel, The chapel’s original interior, designed by Wren, was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in 1779 by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart. Much of the decoration, including the monumental painting above the altar, was provided by the American painter Benjamin West.
The Seaman’s Hospital was closed in 1869; the complex then became the Royal Naval College. It now houses the University of Greenwich and the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. We were lucky enough to hear a recital in the chapel, students from the conservatory playing a Chopin sonata for piano and cello.
With all this hard cultural work under our belts, we struck out into the town of Greenwich in search of a bite. And our happiness was complete when we found a tea house serving cream tea; we remain total suckers for scones with clotted cream and jam. And, as some of you know, I’ve been feeling rather useless and at loose ends since I retired. But I’ve now found my true metier.
Just let me know if you want to place some money on….anything! I’m a bookie at heart.
Refreshed and restored, we walked through Greenwich Park and up its steep hill to the Royal Observatory (which houses the originals of John Harrison’s timekeeping instruments).
But now about the ball of my title. There is no agreement as to the derivation of the term “on the ball.” Most Americans seem to thing it is a baseball term. But the brits have a pretty good case to make. Before there were timepieces that could keep accurate time for weeks and months on end, ships from around the world would gather at the prime meridian (which runs through the Royal Observatory) and wait for a red ball on a flagpole to drop at precisely 1 PM. If you set your timepiece accordingly, you were “on the ball.”
We had been through the Observatory museum before, so we just took advantage of the extraordinary views from the top of the hill.
We made use of a very fast rail link on Southeastern Railways back to London. After a nice glass of wine at the hotel, we explored a new bus route before dinner…and landed just before 9 at our destination, The Wolesley. This is a wild place: a huge, imposing space that now houses a European brasserie.
Everyone in the place seemed unusually pleased to be there; it was a great atmosphere. And the food was surprisingly good. We shared a big platter of fruits de mer to start, along with a bottle of Chablis. Sue then had dover sole; I had a very nice coq au vin (Sue thinks it has been decades since we ate coq au vin). And the Wolesley fruit crumble with crème anglaise was the perfect ending. We lingered over our coffee; the place was still hopping, with tables just sitting down, when we left at 11. A terrific place with a genuine big city feel..
We got a late start, and, when we got downstairs for breakfast, it was a mob scene. It seemed like half of Europe was staying at our hotel. The staff at the hotel is wonderfully amiable and attentive, but they were struggling. All’s well that ends well, though, and we had a nice start to the day.
We wanted to get a couple of little things for friends, so we ambled down Piccadilly, stopping at Hatchards, a bookstore that has occupied the same space on Piccadilly since 1797; it has a wonderful ambiance and a great selection of books. I also gazed longingly at some of the special bottling of whisky at The Scotch Shop, but there are finally some costs to bringing only carry-ons! Our goal, though, was Fortnum and Mason. This purveyor of luxury food items has been at its site on Piccadilly even longer than Hathards–since 1707. Can’t tell you what we bought, but we had fun doing it; the atmosphere is particularly festive before Christmas (the Brits do know how to do Christmas).
We then visited the Royal Academy of Art, which is currently offering a big show by the South African artist William Kentridge. I had badly wanted to go, but tickets weren’t available at times that worked for us. But I did have a memorable William Kentridge experience as we waited in line for breakfast at our hotel.
American boy, late teens: “So what are we doing this morning?”
Grandmother: “Don’t you remember? We have tickets for William Kentridge!”
Boy: “Who’s that?”
Grandmother: “You know, in the Miami house, you have that huge piece at the top of the stairs.”
Just as education is wasted on the young, art is wasted on the rich.
We made our way back to the hotel for a very brief break before the theater. We had scored two tickets for the matinee of the hottest show in London, C.P. Taylor’s “Good.” Sue had tried repeatedly on line, to no avail, but it turned out that the theater was 100 yards from the hotel, and we were able to get tickets at the box office. The play isn’t easy to watch-it is the powerful demonstration of the slow moral collapse of a “good person” in the face of Nazism. And its effect is amplified by the quality of the actors: David Tennant (Broadchurch) as John Halder, a literature professor who rationalizes his role in the destruction of family and friends; Sharon Small (Inspector Linley) in several roles: his mother, wife, lover, and even a male Nazi officer; and Elliot Levy (Olivier for his role in Cabaret) as his only friend, a Jew, and as a Nazi officer shaping Nazi genocide. We’ve seen some great theater in London over the years, and this ranks as one of the best (I think particularly of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera with Fiona Shaw at the National Theater and Pinter’s No Man’s Land with Michael Gambon at the Duke of York).
We did a nice walk along Marylebone High Street before dinner, stopping at a bar for a drink (yes, we raised the average age by at least a decade). We had dinner at Chourangi, a restaurant with the food of Calcutta; we had eaten here with Cindy and Gary Hughes after our walk in June and liked it a lot. And it was just as good tonight: steamed crab and prawn in banana leaf, and curries with prawns (Sue) and lamb (Mike).
Back at the hotel, we retreated to the Resident’s Lounge for a cup of tea…from where I am writing to you, dear Reader.
As many times as we’ve visited / lived in London, we had never been to the Victoria and Albert museum. Today changed all that. We didn’t try to do too much: we lingered over the spectacular collection of Persian rugs centered on the Ardabil Carpet, said to be the oldest dated carpet in existence. Here’s more if you’re interested: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-ardabil-carpet
The collection includes one more very old, spectacular piece, the Chelsea Carpet and an intricate carpet owned by William Morris, who used it for some of the patterns in his own textiles.
Our next goal was the photography collection, but the museum is so rich that we were constantly tempted to stop by objects small…and very large.
The V and A has a remarkable photo collection, but the space itself is under construction and reduced to two large galleries. The first contained contemporary photography…most of which was relatively uninteresting. The second, however, was a revelation. Maurice Broomfield was a school dropout who started working at the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby, England. In order to escape what the perceived as soul-killing work, he studied art and photography at night and soon made a career photographing British industry. Much of his work appeared in trade publications, but he also had artistic ambitions, and made large display prints for gallery exhibition. We had just seen the large and impressive show of the work of Bernd and Hill Becher at the Met in New York, and Broomfield’s approach to industrial photography was diametrically opposed, but just as impressive. Where the Bechers removed any sign of human labor from their images, focusing on the vanishing forms of industrial architecture–what they called “anonymous sculptures”–Broomfield was concerned to show the worker in his, and very often her, environment. A spectacular show.
We will certainly be back to the VA…one could spend a week here and barely scratch the surface.
My knees weren’t cooperating today, so we hopped a bus to Hyde Park Corner and then walked through Green Park to the gates of Buckingham Palace and from there into St. James Park, one of our favorite places in Central London.
As we walked through the park toward Admiralty Arch and Trafalgar Square, we saw…a parrot whisperer.
The moment was eerily reminiscent of some key scenes–‘the silence”–in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (high cultural references are presumably permitted on the day the rednecks lost the Senate and may lose the House).
We wanted to duck back into the National Gallery for two small shows: one on Manet and his only student, Eva Gonzalez (really lovely) and the other “Turner on Tour.” The two magnificent Turners from the Frick (Dieppe Harbor and Cologne), which is closed, were displayed with a lot of ancillary information.
We put our feet up for a bit of reading and political gloating before it was time for another favorite activity: Evensong, this time at Saint Martins in the Fields.
The choir was unusually young, but in beautiful voice. This was a less formal, more vernacular version than what one hears at Westminster Abbey, with some beautiful hymns in place of some of the traditional elements. In looking around, I think we were the only non-parishioners in attendance.
We closed out our last full day with a wonderful meal at The Drapers Arms, a well-known gastropub in Islington.
The show stopper was our main: a gargantuan platter of vegetable surrounding a cote de boeuf that had been aged for 35 days. This was probably the best beef I have ever eaten…take that, Peter Luger! The bottle of Pommard that we splurged on wasn’t bad, either!
