Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Category: Central London

  • London – City of London – Museum of London (1681 Pudding Lane Bakery Site Plaque)

    London – City of London – Museum of London (1681 Pudding Lane Bakery Site Plaque)

    This is another marvellous exhibit in the Museum of London, a plaque dating to 1681 which was placed outside the site where the Great Fire of London started on Pudding Lane. The museum notes that the plaque had to be removed in the early eighteenth century, as traffic jams were caused by people stopping to read it.

    The plaque reads:

    “Here by ye permission of heaven, hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists, by ye hand of their agent Hubert, who confessed, and on ye ruins of this place declared the fact, for which he was hanged vizt. that here began that dreadful fire, which is described and perpetuated on and by the neighbouring pillar.”

    This attempt to blame the Catholics, as someone always has to be blamed for disasters, was also replicated on the Monument which still stands today by the underground station of the same name. The text on the main monument was though scratched out in the early nineteenth century. Hubert refers to Robert Hubert who confessed to the fire, but no-one really believed him during the criminal trial. However, it suited the authorities to find him guilty and he was hanged at Tyburn on 27 October 1666.

    The actual state of the plaque is a little more complex than the signage at the museum suggests, as the plaque was taken down on the orders of King James II, not unsurprising as he was a Catholic monarch (the last one in this country). King William III ordered it back up again, before its removal for the traffic reason mentioned by the museum, probably in around 1750 to 1755.

    After the plaque was taken down for the final time, it was placed in the cellars of the building of 23 Pudding Lane, where it remained until the authorities demolished it to build Monument Street. It is remarkable that this has survived, but it’s a reminder of the days when people made false statements about those with other beliefs in a bid to create disharmony and hate. Perhaps those days haven’t quite yet gone away. Anyway, it’s rather lovely that no-one ever destroyed it and that it is today in the Museum of London.

  • London – City of London – Museum of London (1667 Tavern Sign)

    London – City of London – Museum of London (1667 Tavern Sign)

    Unfortunately, the lighting in this part of the Museum of London wasn’t very good when I took the photo, but this is still one of my favourite exhibits. It’s a tavern sign for the Three Kings pub and it dates to 1667, the period when the city was rebuilding following the devastating Great Fire of London. A rule at the time meant that the sign had to be placed flat on the external part of the building, signs weren’t allowed to stick out.

    The sign is made from limestone and it was found in Bucklesbury, an area of London which is long gone, although it’s somewhere around where Bank underground station is today.

    A line drawing of the sign from the late nineteenth century. I liked this because the labourers rebuilding London would have seen this sign when they went into the tavern for their one or eight pints, a rather lovely little piece of history. As for the pub, not much seems to exist in the records, it may have been somewhere that was only trading for a few years. But, thanks to this sign, its memory lives on.

  • London – City of London – Museum of London

    London – City of London – Museum of London

    It’s about eight years since I last visited the Museum of London, and it might be the final time as they’ll be on the move to a new site in Smithfields in a couple of years. The design of the whole Barbican area isn’t great, it puts road users first and it’s meant that the museum is only accessible by pedestrian bridges. It’s not ideal.

    The stairs to get to the museum are gloomy, although they’ve done what they can to brighten them up a bit.

    My ticket was for 10:00, which was when the museum opened, and a small queue had formed. There was the choice to visit an exhibition on some rock band, which I ignored, instead wanting just to see the permanent collection. The museum was sufficiently quiet to allow for social distancing, although the queues were much longer when I left the building. This is also the first museum I’ve been to which scans visitors on the way out, which makes sense so that they know how many people are still in the building.

    The museum was sufficiently interesting, although the lighting in some places is quite poor. There are also some huge chunks of the city’s history missed out and although it’s inevitably impossible to show everything, there’s not much about industry or ethnography. Hopefully, the larger amount of space at the new museum will perhaps give them chance to tell these stories as well.

    There are numerous interactive elements that visitors are usually welcome to touch or engage with, although they’ve had to put plexiglass over all of those. There was though no shortage of hand sanitiser around the museum and sufficient staff to monitor visitors without getting in the way.

    Anyway, some photos below of the interior of the museum, more posts about some individual exhibits I liked will follow. At some point…..

     

  • London – Brewdog Seven Dials

    London – Brewdog Seven Dials

    I’m slowly working my way around the Brewdogs of the world, only nearly all of them to go (but I’ actively working on this)…. This one is in Covent Garden, named after the Seven Dials road junction.

    This Brewdog feels more pub-like than some of their other outlets, not least because it was a pub when they purchased it, the Marquis Of Granby and before that the Ape & Bird.

    The downstairs bar, which wasn’t in use, which has a step near to the base of the stairs down to it just to add some excitement to the proceedings. I managed to trip on it, but I put that down to me being an idiot, before noting four other reviews by others saying they’ve tripped. Someone will likely take action against Brewdog at some point about that step, but that’s a matter for them…… The ground floor was busier, indeed pretty full, although the first floor wasn’t in use either.

    The beer list and although the Big Joe by Overtone sounded exciting it came in at £6.50 for just a third of a pint, so I was more moderate and opted for Brewdog’s own Pineapple Coconut Crumb that I haven’t had before. I wish more pubs offered a beer list like this, or perhaps had a stab at just managing not to stock every bland IPA they can possibly find on their beer list. Looking at Greene King pubs here…. And Marstons….

    And here it is, a rather glorious beer with a welcome surfeit of pineapple and a taste of coconut to go along with it. A very summery drink, smooth and at the appropriate temperature (that was there for Nathan who noticed I keep using that phrase….).

    And the Cluck Norris burger, a chicken burger in buttermilk with avocado at the base and cajun mayo at the top. I do like avocado (I accept it’s a junk food compared to my usual diet of heavily processed, but yet glorious, chicken bakes from Greggs) and there was a generous portion of it and it added a lot to the whole burger, both in taste and texture. The chicken burger, and I’m not sure what part of the bird they’re using here, had a bit of a crunch to the outside and had the sufficient flavours that I was hoping for. The fries were moreish, fluffy on the interior and firm on the exterior, all served as a perfectly sufficient portion. Usually, this would be £14, but the Government’s eat out to help out reduced the price to £7, which is much more reasonable.

    The service was beautifully polite as ever, although it wasn’t the smoothest. I struggled to get a fork and my tap water never arrived at all, although I remembered I had my own water bottle in my bag. I decided to use my water bottle to advertise the LDWA to anyone who happened to be walking past the table, not that anyone bloody noticed. Anyway, I digress.

    I dread to think how much rent Brewdog must be paying for these premises, but the reviews of the bar are high and hopefully they’re getting it all back comfortably. The range of beers here was quite frabjous, to quote Lewis Carroll, so I’m prepared to forgive the lack of fork as otherwise the customer service was spot-on and the drinks range was better than any Fullers pub than I’ve ever been in…..

  • London – Tavistock Place (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Plaque)

    London – Tavistock Place (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Plaque)

    This is 36 Tavistock Place in London and what might look like any other town-house, but it has a special little claim to fame. It’s where Lenin stayed in May 1908 on one of his visits to the city, conveniently located near to the British Museum’s Reading Room which he frequently visited during his stay. Under 10 years later he was the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian SFSR, with the Tsars deposed.

    The plaque was put up by the Marchmont Association in November 2012 and they reported that not everyone was happy as they got a complaint from a local resident saying:

    “Appalling! He was responsible for a movement that caused far more deaths than Hitler, from which the Russians are only just recovering. I intend to email the Chair dissociating myself from the Marchmont Association.”

  • London – Amen Corner

    London – Amen Corner

    The beautifully named Amen Corner is located near to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the bottom-right of the above map from the end of the nineteenth century.

    Although the buildings along Amen Corner are modern (and rather unimpressive), the street-line is original and is unchanged. The street takes its name from when monks used to walk along Paternoster Row chanting the Lord’s Prayer and they would reach the “Amen” section just as they walked down this street, before entering St. Paul’s Cathedral. That’s the story on Wikipedia and the one that’s repeated the most often on-line.

    However, a different reason was given in the nineteenth century, which was that this was where monks would find a corner to repeat their prayers privately, in the hope that they would be fortunate for a whole year. There’s probably more to this story than the perceived origin quoted today, but, I have no idea…..

     

  • London – Central London (Cordwainer Statue)

    London – Central London (Cordwainer Statue)

    This statue is located on Watling Street in the ward known as Cordwainer, named after the shoemakers who worked in this area. There’s a difference between a cordwainer and a cobbler, as the former makes shoes and the latter fixes shoes. The word is from the French ‘cordewaner’, meaning shoemaker, which is derived from the Spanish town of Córdoba in Andalusia whether the leather used in shoemaking was often from.

    The statue was commissioned in 2002 by the Ward of Cordwainer Club to mark their centenary. Initially, the statue was placed in the churchyard of St Mary le Bow, but was moved to its current location a couple of years later. The statue is located near to the site of the Livery Hall of the Cordwainers’ Company, where there were six successive halls from 1440 until 1941. When the hall was destroyed in the London Blitz, a decision was made by the company that they wouldn’t construct another. The Worshipful Company of Cordwainers still exists, but they’re primarily a charitable organisation, with some members being descendants of shoe-makers and some working in the industry today. One of their charitable efforts in recent years was a bike ride from Córdoba, where their name began, to London.

  • London – Christ Church Greyfriars

    London – Christ Church Greyfriars

    I haven’t paid much attention to these ruins before, but they have a considerable heritage as they are from a monastic church built in the thirteenth century on what is now Newgate Street. The monastery was dissolved during the Reformation and was turned into a parish church which was given by King Henry VIII to the Mayor of London for the use of the city’s population. This church building was though lost, along with most others in the heart of the city, during the Great Fire of London in 1666. The replacement building was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, but this in turn was unfortunately destroyed in 1940 during the London Blitz.

    The few sections of the remaining church still standing were demolished following the end of the Second World War, with the site turned into public gardens. There are some important people who have been buried at this site over the centuries, including Isabella of France (also the Queen of England), Marguerite of France (another Queen of England) and Joan of England (who was the Queen of Scotland). I’m equally confused as to who was Queen of where, but it’s evidence of the importance of the church.

    Some of the surviving arches and it’s positive that it was decided to keep this as a public park, rather than shoving up another office block on the site.

    The former door into the nave.

    The gardens are impressive and before this health scare meant fewer people came into London, I imagine that this was a busy place for those wanting to eat their lunch.

    The tower, which was completed in 1704, survived the London Blitz and was restored in 1960.

    There are many more photos of how the church used to look at https://thecitizensmemorial.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/11/.

  • London – Chinatown

    London – Chinatown

    Some photos from Chinatown in London on Monday evening. Although London had felt quiet all day, there was a bit more vibrancy with people taking part in the Eat Out to Help Out scheme and most restaurants looked pretty full. Within a short distance of Chinatown and Soho though it remained a different matter, numerous restaurants and takeaways not even opening at all this month.

  • London – Quiet on the Underground

    London – Quiet on the Underground

    OK, so Chancery Lane isn’t ever the busiest of London underground stations, but nonetheless, it was eerily quiet this afternoon.

    The packed platform.

    Endless amounts of warnings about social distancing.

    Mind the Gap…. Still quiet at Oxford Street.

    It was a little busier on the Oxford Street platform to get onto the Bakerloo line, but it’s still all rather quiet.

    As for TFL, they’re not doing particularly well at keeping people safe. The first two hand-sanitiser dispensers I tried were empty. So, on a quest to discover how bothered TFL really are, I tried another six more during my journey into Oxford Street. Two worked, another four were empty. I won’t veer into politics, but this really isn’t a particularly good look for TFL and pretty much every other transport operator seems to manage.

    Anyway, I quite enjoyed the quiet network and there was a very high percentage of people wearing masks and lots of social distancing. I did note one man cough and this alarmed a woman who fled the scene but, otherwise, all uneventful.