LONDON 4B: Sky Garden, Zari, British Museum

View from Sky Garden, looking towards the Tower Bridge

Fr 27 May 

This post for Friday 27 May was written on that day, but is being posted now after adding photos. We spent Friday first in the central city section, north of the Thames, and then in the Bloomsbury area, more towards the west. I feel like I'm just starting to understand the areas of London.

Orange markers were Thursday's South Bank visits,
Yellow on far right is Sky Garden, far left is
Zari Galley and 2nd left is British Museum.

We started off the day by taking the District line to the Monument stop, where indeed there is a gigantic monument! It looks like a normal monument enlarged several times, so much so that you can actually go in it and up to the top (though we didn't). It's a monument to the Great Fire of London in 1666, built not long after, in the 1670's. We didn't go up the monument in part because we knew we were already going somewhere with views. Instead we had a quick breakfast in the nearby historic Leadenhall Market area.

Sky Garden

Sky Garden building

Then we walked on to our main goal, the Sky Garden, which Allison had recommended to us. It's a large viewing area atop a 38-story building, opened in 2015. The views are indeed spectacular, and they were especially nice on Friday, as we lucked out with a sunny, clear day. Amazingly, the Sky Garden is free, but you do need to book a ticket, and Doug had booked ours when Allison first recommended it (~3 weeks ago). Because we had pre-booked tickets, we thought entry would be fast, but in the end it did take some time to get in. It took time partly because they were taking walk-ins as well, but also because you go through a simple security process, where bags are scanned and you walk through a metal detector.

At the top, the views are great, especially on the south side, facing the Thames River. We could see the Globe (very tiny) and the Tate, which we visited yesterday! 

Globe is circled, Tate has a square

The space itself is also impressive, being three stories high, and having lots of plants, as suggested by its Sky Garden name. There's a cafe and a restaurant, and at one point Doug got us some avocado/courgette (zucchini) cake, and we munched in a quiet corner before going on our way. 

Zari Gallery

Next, we took the Central line from Bank to Tottenham Court Road. We noticed that this Tube line seemed older than the District line; there could be more of a gap to "mind" when you boarded or got off the trains. On the plus side, when we got to the Tottenham Court Road stop, the station had more interesting decor than most.

Coming out on Tottenham Court Road, we could feel that the vibe seemed a little different than in other parts of the city we'd been in. It seemed younger, hipper. We tracked down the Gallery, which had an exhibition called "The Art of the Athlete," featuring works where the artist is also an athlete. We were interested because our bootcamp leader, a former track star and current coach, had a couple works being displayed there. It was a small but very pleasant gallery, with the exhibition taking up space on both the first and second floors. Some athletes' work had to do with sport and athletes, but others enjoyed art as a way to explore other realms.

The British Museum

In general, we weren't going to revisit places we saw 23 years ago (Buckingham Palace, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, etc.)—not because we didn't like them, but just to give us time for discovering other aspects of London we wanted to see, such as Kew Gardens and the Globe. For that reason, we might have skipped the British Museum, but it wasn't far from Zari Gallery, and it's free, so...

The British Museum has so. much. stuff! And it has very large pieces, not just little artifacts in cases. Although some of the larger items are casts of the originals, many are actual original pieces—like the friezes from the Parthenon are the actual stonework from there. We focused on the Roman period and medieval times; both of which have been relevant to other parts of our trip. To give a very small sampling, below are photos of Doug getting a snack in the now enclosed Great Court (opened in 2000), some Roman busts, a famous medieval ivory chess set (~1150-1175AD), a ~600AD Anglo-Saxon helmet as it is now and a version of what it is believed to have looked like, and a guide explaining the Rosetta Stone (using a copy so he can touch it). The real one is in the museum, in a case. 

It's hard not to be captivated by the British Museum... the collections are so strong, and often dramatic—in terms of large pieces and/or significance. One of the guides we listened to touched upon an ongoing controversy in museum work, and that is: who "owns" pieces of the past? Should Britain still retain many artifacts which came to it in part because of the now gone British Empire? At that same time, those artifacts are clearly being very carefully kept, maintained, and documented, and there's value in being able to have a large assemblage of items in one place. These are tricky questions, and ones the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford was also contending with. In a way, items that belong to long gone civilizations, like the Egyptians and Romans, are really the heritage of all humankind; the question is not so much who "owns" them then, but who gets to be their caretaker? 

Next Post

On Saturday, our last full day in London, we have a couple of missions to accomplish, but otherwise the day is free to wander at will, to catch last tastes of London.

Close-up of medieval chessmen, from 
a postcard I bought at the British Museum

LONDON 3B: The Globe, the Tate Modern, the National Theater

 

Shakespeare's Globe Theater

Th 26 May 

This is the continuation of the post about Thursday, 26 May. It was written on that day but is posting late, as photos weren't added until now. All of these activities were in London's South Bank area (on the southern bank of the Thames).

Shakespeare's Globe

Our first destination today was Shakespeare's Globe Theater, where Doug had booked an 11am tour, a few days ago. We had originally hoped to watch a performance there as well, but that would have to have been booked even farther in advance. However I'm very happy we got to do the theater tour at least; it did not disappoint.

I've heard about so much about the recreation of Shakespeare's Globe theater (opened in 1997); it was very cool to finally see it and sit in it. It's actually much nicer than I thought it would be. I knew they tried to replicate the original 1599 and 1614 versions of the theater, so I expected it would be pretty rustic. But the seating and stage decor is actually nicer and more colorful than I had imagined. Yes, I can believe you might want a cushion after sitting a long time on the bench seating, but with the thrust stage and cozy theater size, I think it'd be great to watch a performance there.

Our tour guide was very energetic and told us about the history of Shakespeare and getting the original theater established, and about the various efforts to establish a replica later on. She also helped us imagine what it would have been like to go to the theater in Shakespeare's time—what was different about performances (e.g. no female performers), and also what was different about audience behavior and comforts (e.g. NO TOILETS...). 

The organization that runs the Globe also built a small, fully indoor theater in the same complex, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Our guide mentioned that performances there are often lit only by candlelight. That would be something to see! Sigh, another item to add to our growing Next-Time-We-Go-to-England list.

The Tate Modern

After a nice lunch at a nearby Turkish restaurant, we continued on to the Tate Modern. It's wonderful that many museums in the UK are free; it encourages you to pop in, even for short visits, and it means anyone at any income level can go (though some special exhibitions do require a fee). Like the Globe, I had heard of the Tate before the trip; unfortunately, unlike the Globe, I found the Tate a little disappointing. I think part of the disappointment is from not understanding its focus beforehand. I thought it would be like the great MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, or even like the SF MOMA, that have classics of modern art as well as newer artists. The Tate seems to be more focused on current artists, and to its credit, featured a lot of female and non-white artists. However sometimes the pieces seemed more uneven in quality and connectedness. 

There were pieces that we liked though; below are photos of two of them. One is a performance art piece by Lee Mingwei that involved a ritualistic sweeping of rice by two performers. You could watch it from different levels of the museum. It had viewers, including us, mesmerized. Another was a small "artist room" devoted to one artist, Phyllida Barlow, a sculptor,  It included a video of her talking about her work, which added a lot to the experience.

The National Theater: The Father and the Assassin

We felt we needed to see some kind of theatrical performance in London. One of our friends especially loves the theater in London, and encouraged us to go. I think that friend typically goes to West End shows more (kind of like Broadway shows in NYC), but tickets can be hard to get. Based on glowing reviews, Doug ended up getting us tickets to a serious drama at the National Theater, "The Father and the Assassin."

It turned out to be an interesting, excellent production, and also a show that is particularly relevant to England, because it takes place during the ending of Britain's colonial rule of India. It tells the story of the real person who murdered Gandhi, Nathuram Godse, but along the way it illuminates various aspects of the times he lived in: why India was fighting to shake off colonial rule, how Gandhi himself evolved, and how Godse evolved and became a radicalized Hindu nationalist. The playwright and performers succeeded in making a complex political situation into compelling theater. You root for both Ganse and Gandhi, and you understand more about the challenges India faced. It was very good, very creative story telling.

[Photo of a scene in the play is from a review.]

Nightlife along the Thames

After we got out of the show, it turned out that the riverbank by the Thames was just bustling with nighttime activity. The National Theater, where we were at, has three different auditoriums, so other shows than ours were letting out, too. Plus there were lots of cafes and small eateries open by the river. We were heading back to our hotel, but Doug commented that "some of these people are just starting their night."

Next Post

Tomorrow is the Sky Garden, plus a search for the Zari Gallery.

A favorite memory from our 1999 trip was 
having ice cream at a show; in London you
can do that. Doug surprised me at this 
intermission with a tub of gelato!!

Doug liked that the Tate has a floor 0.

LONDON 4A: Latest dinner so far

Spring roll with pea flowers

Fr 27 May 

(I added these dates to show the day I'm writing about, vs. the day post is published)

Once again, I was too tired to finish Friday's post, or catch up on finishing Thursday! I did write most of the narrative section for Friday at least; I like to write the narrative on the same day if I can, because one point of the blog is to capture impressions at the time of seeing things. 

On Friday we saw the Sky Garden, Zari Gallery, and the British Museum. I will publish that post once I've added pictures, but here's a small tidbit about Friday in the meantime—about food, even. Today (Saturday) is likely to be somewhat less busy, so maybe I'll catch up tonight. It'll be our last full day here...

 Dinner at 9:45pm

The British Museum is open late on Fridays, which was both a good and a bad thing. It meant we stayed there til 8ish, and by the time we got back to our hotel—walking back to the Totteningham Court Road stop, then Central line back to Bank, then a convoluted Tube transition to connect to Monument on the District line and riding back to Earl's Court—it was 9:30ish. Fortunately we found a lovely vegan Thai place only a couple blocks away, that was open til 10:30. It was very good—I recommend it if you're ever in the Earl's Court area—Mali Vegan Thai.

LONDON 3A: part 1 of our day in the South Bank

We're staying where the red center marker is; yesterday we
went out to Kew Gardens (orange market on left), today
we went to the South Bank area, just by the river Thames.

Th 26 May 

I was able to complete the entire narrative portion of the post about this day, Thursday, but I fell asleep before adding photos. For now I'll just post the intro section, which does have a map and photo, and plan to do a continuation post (LONDON 3B) tomorrow. I'll also say that it was another great day.

Today was more of a real London city day. We spent the day in the South Bank area, where you can find the Globe (as in the recreation of Shakespeare's Globe theater), the Tate Modern (a museum of modern art), and the National Theater. St. Paul's Cathedral is nearby, too, on the north side of the river, but we didn't go there today. It's wonderful how easy it is to get places. On both days we've been able to get to where we want to go on the District line of the Tube, without having to transfer.

London feels very different from any of the other places on this trip; it's the only big city we're seeing, and it's a huge, sophisticated, international city. Already we've noticed hearing lots of different languages all the time, which we actually remember noticing on our trip 23 years ago as well. Everything's bigger and busier. Even the cars, on average, are a little bigger. In Bath and elsewhere on the trip, cars were noticeably small (on average). SUVs or minivans are still rare in London, but there are more regular sedan size cars, and to my surprise I still see the classic black London taxis (also a remembered feature from our earlier trip). 

TO BE CONTINUED