Our first of six consecutive days of sight-seeing with the London Pass.
Well, we started the day a little later than we hoped, getting out of the apartment close to eleven. We headed over to the Banqueting House first. We had such difficulty actually finding the building along the street, we didn’t enter until noon. It is just a single, relatively small building; the remains of a grand palace which burned down in 1698. The Palace of Whitehall was the main residence of monarchs from 1530 until its destruction and was larger than both the Vatican and Versailles. The Banqueting House was designed by Inigo Jones, a well-known 17th century architect and surveyor to King James I. It was a building primarily used for many parties and masquerades. However, I thought the most interesting bit was that it was the place where Charles I was executed by Oliver Cromwell, et al. He walked out of one of the windows onto a platform and was publically beheaded. It is amazing to walk upon the same stones as so many historic figures (not just Charles, but James I, etc). The stones themselves have those slight worn impressions of history. Amazing.
Since the Banqueting House was relatively small (it’s really just one huge room with a throne and a really nice ceiling), we walked down Whitehall Road to Jewel Tower. This building was also small and just remaining bit of a larger palace (Palace of Westminster). It was built in 1365 as the King’s Privy Wardrobe to house Edward III’s treasures (but not the Crown jewels). One of only two surviving buildings from the fire of 1834, it has been used to house the historic records of the House of Lords, as the calibration area for the Ministry of Weights and Measures, and is now a museum with exhibitions on Parliament. Once again, it was amazing to walk through this 645 year-old building with its original stonework, treading up the spiral staircase uneven from consistent use. Now, it’s over to the London home of Benjamin Franklin for some more, though not as old, history.
Since the Ben Franklin house was on a specific tour schedule, we found a pub near the house and stopped in to have a quick bite. After a small lunch, we walked around the corner only to find the house was closed for filming. Out of L.A. and still we run into filming closures. Fabulous.
Well, we decided to rearrange our tour schedule a bit and replaced our Franklin house tour with a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral. The grand scale of this building is apparent as soon as you walk through the doors. Unfortunately, the Golden and Stone galleries were closed due to ice. Yikes! We did manage to climb the seemingly never-ending spiral staircase to the whispering gallery. I was actually a little dizzy by the time we reached the top. Of course, the view is spectacular, if not also a little vertigo inducing. Eventually, we made our way back down the staircase, through the vast nave and aisles embellished with chapels of golden carvings and marble statues, then down into the crypt. Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of the current cathedral itself, is buried here along with much of his family. I’ve always found the crypts interesting when they give little glimpses of the lives of those they hold. This crypt was a treasure trove! The two largest tombs were those of Lord Admiral Nelson, known for the Battle of Trafalgar, and the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo (more on that later). They were each encased in masses of polished marble as big as a car in their own rooms which seemed bigger than our current apartment; definitely intimidating.
For more information on the Banqueting House, go to:
www.hrp.org.uk/banquetinghouse/
For more information on Inigo Jones:
www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/jones_inigo.shtml
For more information on the Palace of Whitehall, try:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Whitehall
For more information on St. Paul’s, go to:www.stpauls.co.uk
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment