Continuing Where We Left Off

Since Bob's been working in Bloomsbury for a while now, we decided to do something that we haven't yet done in all our self-guided walking tours: finish the second half of the Bloomsbury tour that we started a while ago! Even though we've done a fair bit of exploring around London, today made us realise that we've somehow walked all around the area of today's tour without actually venturing into this small space of interesting streets. For example, Bob and I met at a place that we had no idea existed until very recently: the Brunswick Centre. An enormous concrete mixed-use residential/ commercial space, the place should feel sad in those ways that outdoor malls tend to feel, but somehow it works. My favourite discovery here was a outlet of Waitrose--fancier than Sainsbury's or Tesco and always good for a browse.

As we walked through the square across from the Brunswick, I noticed an odd sight: a woman opened a small animal crate and let out a large black bunny for what looked like a little stroll in the park!

The Foundling Museum was closed today, so we just had a look at the simple, but attractive exterior.

St George's Gardens was the first London burial ground to be located away from its associated churches. Opened in 1713, St George's became extremely overcrowded and was closed to burials in 1855. In 1885, the space was reopened as a public garden as part of efforts to create "open air sitting rooms" for the poor.

This very old, extremely worn stone is located near one entrance to the gardens:

A terracotta statue of Euterpe, muse of instrumental music, stands near the centre of the gardens. Once one of nine muses that adorned the nearby Apollo Inn, Euterpe was relocated here after the building's demolition in 1961.

As we cut through Regent Square, Bob said, "Birds in the tree?" and I looked up expecting to see some unusual birds, but not this unusual!

The plaque which Bob spotted at the base of the tree mentions that the artwork with this name was created by neighbourhood youth, in association with an established artist and Camden council. If Bob hadn't spotted the plaque, we would have missed this unique bird sighting! We reached the end of the walking tour up on Euston Road, where we came to St Pancras Parish Church--a Greek Revival church that was the most expensive church of its time (completed in 1822). Coincidentally, I had the church on my list as hosting an event about which I was curious, so we descended into the crypt for a look:

As with some of our other art wanderings in London, the space in which the art was shown was itself a fascinating sight. St Pancras crypt was closed as a burial vault in 1854, and was later used as an air raid shelter in World Wars I and II.

Back at home, I unloaded some of our Waitrose purchases. I like to think that I'm not someone who's swayed by packaging, but Waitrose's own-brand goods are quite pleasingly designed:

And isn't this just the prettiest set of yogourt ever?

The only thing that would have made it absolutely perfect would have been if the red-topped pots were situated diagonally across from each other, but that's just plain picky (and no doubt some of you are shaking your heads right about now). Bob chimed in with the always helpful, "But what if they're really yucky?" to which I retorted, oh so cleverly, "They won't be yucky." So there.

Hampstead

Since the overground train was actually running this weekend (various parts of the line tend to close on weekends for scheduled maintenance), we took the train over to Camden Arts Centre to catch their latest exhibit. The building is such a lovely space that it's always a pleasure to wander around, even on the rare occasions (like today) when the show is disappointing.

With no real destination in mind after we left the gallery, we wandered through Hampstead, and the combination of hills and warm sunshine meant we shed our scarves and unzipped our winter coats as we walked. Hampstead is always a great place for a stroll, and its lovely buildings, gardens, and lanes are filled with postcard-perfect charm.

John Constable was fond of painting Hampstead Heath, and the Constable family tomb is in a Hampstead graveyard.

Back when we visited London in 2005, we sat outside the pub in the centre of the next photo, sipping drinks in the hot July air, marvelling at this wonderful neighbourhood that seemed to reward walkers with lovely details around every turn.

Hampstead is filled with narrow pedestrian paths, and when you start down a path, you usually can't see where it ends, adding to the fun of a Hampstead stroll.

The fire insurance plaque on this house is considered rather valuable today,

although it had a much more practical value when it was initially affixed to the house, since it marked the house as insured, and thus eligible to be attended to by the affiliated fire brigade. Back before there was one fire brigade that worked in a defined geographical region, if your house was on fire and you didn't have a fire insurance plaque or the brigade that arrived wasn't one covered by your insurance scheme, you were out of luck--very strange to think about today! While the owl beside this next door was what first caught my attention, Bob pointed out the swan knocker that completes the bird theme:

Speaking of birds, I quite like the name of this yard:

I almost missed the eclectic detail on this gate as we walked past:

We moved our clocks forward an hour today for British Summer Time (all you lucky Canadians out there have been enjoying that extra hour of sunlight for almost an entire month!), so after browsing for a while in the Hampstead branch of one of our favourite bookshops, Daunt Books, we felt like it was still only 4:30 P.M. or so when we walked back out onto the bright street. When we realised it was closer to 6:00 P.M., we popped into Marks & Spencer to pick up some pizzas for dinner, and got on our train home. When I checked the boxes at home to see what temperature to set the oven to, I noticed a very strange blurb that seemed to belong to a science-fiction film:

This must be some sort of early April Fool's joke, right? I turned the box around and around, and sure enough, there was a "smart" code:

It turns out that the Smart Oven does actually exist, although it seems quite strange to think that anyone would need a special oven to cook store-bought pizza! Of course, this gadget doesn't seem targeted at the gourmet cook, with a website that features downloadable smart codes for "recipes" involving heating/ cooking potatoes, soup, and spaghetti on toast. Wouldn't it take longer to look up, download, print, and scan a smart code to heat up some canned soup than to heat the same soup in a conventional microwave (or even on the stove itself)? Ah, but the so-called Smart Oven doesn't exactly seem to be a haven of logic, so I guess I shouldn't ask such questions . . .

Another Look

On my way out of a branch of Islington library that I've been to many times, I decided to have a peek at the area toward the back of the building, and when I craned my neck up, I was rewarded with an unexpectedly pleasant sight:

Timing

It's that time of year when the space of a few days means the difference between a tree that's about to bloom, a tree heavy with flowers, and a tree surrounded by a carpet of fallen petals.

A Hint of Warmth (27 March)

I went to Regent's Park library to pick up a book this afternoon, and since today was the first time this year that the sun has started to produce some real warmth, I decided to take the long way home afterwards, strolling through Regent's Park with the sun on my face. Although the park isn't anywhere near full bloom yet, the gardens were quite wonderful on this spring day.

Just south of the park, the regal residences around Park Square Gardens (which are of course private--plenty of room for us commoners in Regent's Park, after all!) positively glowed in the sun:

H.M.P. (26 March)

These posters are all over the city right now:

H.M.P stands for "Her Majesty's Prison," and the letters are usually followed by the name of the prison in question--of course whoever is putting up these posters is obviously making a comment about the state of London. These particular posters are right outside The Photographers' Gallery, where we had some coffee and toured the current exhibit before heading to a free reading by Alan Sillitoe, who opened his talk with a wordless greeting to the audience, courtesy of his RAF wireless training and some now-ancient equipment:

He offered an autographed copy of one of his novels to anyone who could decipher the message, but the prize went unclaimed as no one could understand his warm welcome without translation. Although I haven't read anything by him (Bob has several of his books), the talk was full of good humour and interesting anecdotes and we also got the chance to see a man of eighty rather comfortably pair a leather vest with a pair of military boots!

Honour

This plaque's call honor deo (honour to god) graces an otherwise unmarked doorway,

but judging from the number of shoppers in the street, more people were honouring the H&M across the street (visible in the door's reflection) at this particular moment!

A Market Town, a Palace, and a Royal Park

The weather forecast for Easter Monday called for sunny skies, so we decided to head to the southwest edges of London for a walk through some areas new to us. After a very long bus-tube-tube-bus journey, we discovered that the sun had gone away and the dark clouds were back--it actually snowed for about five minutes while we were walked along this stretch of the Thames, but the sun came back much later in the walk, making for a pleasant day.

We were in Kingston (proper name: Kingston upon Thames), an historical market town whose oldest council recording dates to 838. Kingston Bridge as it stands today was built in 1825, although an older wooden bridge is thought to have been built in the 13th century. An absolutely absurd number of swans gathered beneath Kingston bridge,

and a pair of less boisterous dogs snoozed on a nearby windowsill.

All Saints Church stands near the market square, with a mixture of work from the 14th, 15th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

The entrance to the church featured this attractive plaque against a lovely backdrop of cherry blossoms.

The market square was quiet today, but the surrounding streets were filled with shoppers filing in and out of high-street shops.

In this next photo, the impressive mock Tudor building in the background had these facades added in the 20th century, while the adjoining building in the foreground dates to 1570.

Now the site of tourist information, this building was once the Market House (built in 1840):

The Druid's Head is Kingston's oldest pub, standing at this location for more than 300 years:

The bridge over the Hogsmill River is called the Clattern (after the sound of horses' hooves), and is the oldest bridge in the area that remains in use.

The Clattern is very close to the Thames, which is where we found even more swans!

All the swans in Vancouver parks have had their wings clipped, so we'd never seen a swan flying until we moved to London. Although we've witnessed this strange sight a few times, I was never quick enough with the camera to catch the event, until today:

Each time we've seen swans flying, we've heard them before we've seen them--they're not exactly graceful fliers, and those first few moments of flight always involve what looks like a supreme effort to haul their bodies out of the water, with wings clipping the water for at least a dozen strokes before the birds fully rise above the surface. They never seem to fly very far either--it really does seem like so much effort for so little reward. We walked along the Thames for a bit before turning back toward the town, where we spotted Kingston's Guildhall. Apparently the coronation stone on which up to seven Saxon kings are believed to have been crowned in the 10th century lies near the Guildhall; we didn't see it, but you can have a peek, if you're curious.

Probably the strangest sight of the day was this:

Rather than some sort of teenage prank, the domino-like procession of phone boxes is instead a 1989 sculpture titled Out of Order.

I always enjoy browsing in Oxfam shops (one of the best charity shops--or as we call them in Canada, "thrift stores"), and Kingston's was built in 1660 as the Three Coneys alehouse--using hand-made bricks:

Across from the Oxfam shop are a set of almshouses, built in 1669 for 12 poor people, six of each gender.

In spite of the presence of quaint buildings and historical tidbits, Kingston left us with the impression of being a part of suburban London overrun with shopping culture, with an anonymous set of high-street shops that doesn't exactly lend the place a distinctive feel. In addition, it seemed to be graced with several enormous shopping malls (which we didn't go into), and the back of one of them definitely dominated this street of more human-scaled homes:

Finished with Kingston, and eager for more greenery and fewer shops, we consulted our A to Z and decided to head over to Bushy Park to see what it was like. The bus we caught dropped us off right in front of Hampton Court Palace, a former royal palace that is meant to be quite impressive.

We walked up to the entrance, but weren't up for the £13.30 admission fee, so we just had a quick look at one part of the exterior before turning around.

We walked through a lovely field of trees and blooms on our way out

and left the grounds,

crossing into adjacent Bushy Park, where our first wildlife sighting was of some deer grazing nearby. That's more like it!

Covering more than 1,000 acres, Bushy Park is the second-largest of the Royal Parks (after Richmond Park). The Diana (Arethusa) fountain

and expansive, orderly landscapes of grass and trees

were impressive, and we walked on neatly mown paths as we cut across this vast space.

We loved Bushy Park and as the sun came out, we thoroughly enjoyed our relaxing walk along the paths,

spotting parakeets

and more deer as we went.

Looking at a map of the park on our way out, we realised there's a lot more to see of this wonderful place, and it's definitely on our list for a return visit!