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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