Today we are doing some grocery shopping to prepare for the return of the boys, tidying the house a bit and doing some advance cooking so they have a favourite meal to enjoy after we pick them up from the airport tomorrow morning. I am also getting around to blogging about our London adventure. It was almost a week so I've divided it into two parts...
London: part one
We spent six nights altogether in London. The first two nights we stayed at a beautiful new hotel called the Aloft Excel, which is located in East London, perhaps 30 minutes along the commuter light rail from the main "tube" lines. We purchased "Oyster" visitor cards on the Eurostar train from Brussels, and so were ready to beep on and off the trains without having to line up and buy a ticket. Like the Amsterdam ov-chipkaart system, one is billed based on distance travelled, and additional funds may be added to the card by using a bank or credit card, at machines located in nearly every station.
Then we moved into central London, to an apartment owned by English friends of ours, who also live in Brussels. This location was very close to Bank Station, and so much more of our exploring was done by bicycle, using the Barclays Cycle Hire system.
Our visit was packed with activities, of a variety of sorts, including visits to museums, the theatre, to famous monuments, and also to some cool shops that allowed us to indulge our personal and professional interests...
We visited the following museums, all of which offered free admission to their permanent exhibitions:
I was really amazed to discover that these museums are all free, and because we didn't feel that we had to "get our money's worth" there was very little of that mad rush to "see" everything. Much of the collections can wait for the next time we visit.
It would be impossible to show you everything, but here are a few sample photographs of what we did see...
There seems to be a lot of theatre going on in London. We chose three different things to see: War Horse, a modern theatre piece with music at the New London Theatre; Antony and Cleopatra, a midnight showing of Shakespeare's play at the open air reconstructed Globe Theatre, and a Proms concert of Berlioz, Elgar, Helen Grime, and Beethoven at the Royal Albert Hall.
First came the Shakespeare, a midnight showing. The Globe Theatre has a thrust stage and most of it is open to the elements, as it would have been in Shakespeare's time. The majority of people pay five pounds and line up to stand in the Yard, but owing to the weather forecast and the three-hour running time of Antony and Cleopatra, we opted to pay fifteen pounds and get a cheap seat under the roof. It was a pleasant show, but not uniformly well cast, and while some diction was crystal-clear others were difficult to understand. It made us realize how lucky we are as Canadians to enjoy the extremely high level of talent, training and technique on view in Shakespearean theatre productions at the Stratford Festival.
Then we moved into central London, to an apartment owned by English friends of ours, who also live in Brussels. This location was very close to Bank Station, and so much more of our exploring was done by bicycle, using the Barclays Cycle Hire system.
Our visit was packed with activities, of a variety of sorts, including visits to museums, the theatre, to famous monuments, and also to some cool shops that allowed us to indulge our personal and professional interests...
Museums
We visited the following museums, all of which offered free admission to their permanent exhibitions:
- The Natural History Museum, where we saw the new "Cocoon" at the Darwin research centre, and saw the paid exhibit Britain: 1,000,000 years of the human story, with many fascinating examples of stone tools, fossils and descriptions of ice age mammals, and reconstructions of Neanderthal and early modern humans
- The Victoria and Albert museum, which was filled with thousands of items of fashion, textiles, decorative items; the highlights for us were the Japanese and Chinese clothes
- The National Portrait Gallery, where we heard a lecture about changing hemlines in women's fashion from 1890-1950, and saw a number of portraits of famous (and to us some not-so-famous) British people, including Queen Elisabeth II, Kate Middleton, Pete Townshend, Dame Judy Dench, Maggie Smith and so forth
- The British Museum: highlights for us were the Babylonian and Assyrian bas-reliefs, Egyptian statuary and bas-reliefs, the Great Torc of Snettisham, the Rosetta Stone (or at least the backs of a whole bunch of people who were excited about it), the Cyrus cylinder, and the famous bronze statue of the cat-goddess Bastet, from 664–332 BC
- The Tate Britain museum, which offers a retrospective display of British art from the 16th-century up to the present day, displayed in a circular pattern around the perimeter of the main building. For us the 1860 room was the highlight, with pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paintings by Rosetti, Millais, and their contemporaries like Singer Sargent, but we also enjoyed the other pieces very much. The central space of Tate Britain is dominated by huge modern architectural pieces by Phylida Barlow, which reminded Maggie very much of stage set pieces. I wonder if she has ever designed for an opera? At the other end of the scale was the William Blake room, which houses many of his astonishingly modern drawings, and some of his working notebooks, but because of the fragility of the pieces they are shown in rotation, in low light conditions and for short periods.
It would be impossible to show you everything, but here are a few sample photographs of what we did see...
The amazing library of the British Museum (I want one)
Need more torc? Head for Snettisham during the iron age, about 75 BC
the "Cyrus" cylinder from 6th century BC Iraq, written in Babylonian cuneiform, which has been described as the earliest known example of a charter of human rights
The Gayer-Anderson cat, named after its donor to the museum
Why did they wear such dandy suspenders / braces? To keep their trousers up...
an Ivory netsuke, used to help attach containers to the obi or sash of a Japanese kimono, as they have no pockets
Apparently there is some historical basis for socks with sandals, if these Egyptian ones from about 400 AD are any indication. Perhaps this person was an English vicar looking for a bit of sun, and a glimpse of the pyramids?
Beautiful embroidery on a sheath dress, from about 1955
Theatre
view of St. Paul's Cathedral from the opposite side of the Millennium footbridge
There seems to be a lot of theatre going on in London. We chose three different things to see: War Horse, a modern theatre piece with music at the New London Theatre; Antony and Cleopatra, a midnight showing of Shakespeare's play at the open air reconstructed Globe Theatre, and a Proms concert of Berlioz, Elgar, Helen Grime, and Beethoven at the Royal Albert Hall.
First came the Shakespeare, a midnight showing. The Globe Theatre has a thrust stage and most of it is open to the elements, as it would have been in Shakespeare's time. The majority of people pay five pounds and line up to stand in the Yard, but owing to the weather forecast and the three-hour running time of Antony and Cleopatra, we opted to pay fifteen pounds and get a cheap seat under the roof. It was a pleasant show, but not uniformly well cast, and while some diction was crystal-clear others were difficult to understand. It made us realize how lucky we are as Canadians to enjoy the extremely high level of talent, training and technique on view in Shakespearean theatre productions at the Stratford Festival.
As you can see from the photo above, not everyone was able to stay dry. Fortunately the rains had more or less finished by the time the play let out at 3:00 am and we made it home without incident.
We did line up for standing places the next day for our second performance of the trip: the Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
This was quite easy to do. One simply goes to the door number 10, behind the hall (the round building pictured above on the left) and start lining up at around 17h or so. One of the stewards will come along and give you a raffle ticket with your priority number on it, and then will caution you sternly that you may leave the queue for 30 minutes at the most, but it would seem by speaking to our neighbouring veteran "day prommers" this is never enforced. At about 17h20 or so someone came along the queue selling the standing tickets for five pounds each. Most people pack a lunch and bottle of wine, and spend the time until the 19h30 concert chatting and eating and drinking. We opted to go have a quick dinner at a local Thai restaurant and then hoofed it back to the line by about one hour before the show. At 18h45 we were in the door and had claimed our places perhaps two metres back from the lip of the stage, with the podium in plain sight.
The Royal Albert Hall is huge, and I must say that it was really magnificent. Its original acoustics left something to be desired so there have been a number of compensating structures placed within it; most obvious are the acoustical reflectors arrayed in a fan shape above the stage, and the round objects, which I assume are diffusers to help kill destructive reverberation, hanging from the ceiling.
It was a very beautiful and moving performance, and now I must get out my score and have a good long listen to the two recordings I have on hand here, of Kathleen Ferrier, and of Dame Janet Baker. Gorgeous music and very well sung, and the orchestra was never too loud.
Beethoven in 1804
The second half was a new piece by Helen Grime, a Scottish composer-in-residence with the Hallé orchestra, called Near Midnight. For me it made the most sense if I thought of it as atmospheric film music, as it was filled with many exciting and "film noir" type motifs. It needed five percussionists and a ton of winds, and was quite effective. This was followed by the Beethoven third symphony, the "heroic" one. It was wonderful. Frequently I turned away from the orchestra and cupped my ears to listen to the house sound coming back from the balconies... it was quite an experience. Now that I know my way around London, and that Eurostar tickets are available for as little as 44 euros each way, I see no reason not to "day prom" again...
Our last theatrical event was the modern piece War Horse, staged at the New London Theatre. Maggie has read the book and seen the Spielberg film, but I knew only that it involved intricate puppets used to simulate horses, puppets so lifelike and also so strong that they could be ridden by actors...
It was a good show, technically well presented, if a little cartoonish in its treatment of the villainous german soldier, and the music was acceptable if a little folksy. It was admirable in its use of French and German without subtitles for those parts that could support it, giving the audience credit that it was smart enough to figure out what was happening; it always makes me cringe when watching a film where the actors speak in caricatured accented English to suggest that they are of another nationality, even when talking amongst themselves. There was no question of the commitment of the actors, and they all did very well; the mysterious singing gypsy narrator who accompanied herself on the accordion carried the whole piece musically; but the puppeteers were the real stars. It was "Black Beauty" set during the First World War, and only the most cynical person would have left without a moist eye; no doubt it is a good starting point for young people to learn more about the tragedies of the First World War, but with a happy ending, for the horse and his rider, at least.
... to be continued
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