Our primary activity this day was a walking tour of Old London. This tour mostly consisted of the City of London (w) - not the entire city of London, but the City (capitalized) of London. This is a small area, just over a square mile, in the center of the greater city. Here's a map:
Note that the City doesn't include many of the familiar London landmarks - the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, etc. All of those things are outside of The City.
According to the Wikipedia article, "The city has a unique political status, a legacy of its uninterrupted integrity as a corporate city since the Anglo-Saxon period and its singular relationship with the Crown." Our tour guide told us that the City has its own Police Force, and not all national laws apply within the City (although the differences are mainly relating to administrative matters). Also, according to the guide, even the King has to present himself at the City limit and request permission to enter the City, although this is of course a ritual formality.
The first thing we saw was this dragon, which our guide told us is the symbol of the City, and marks the City limit:
As we started walking, I noticed one of England's iconic red phone booths. They're disappearing in England, just like pay phones are disappearing here in the U.S., but there are still some left. I figured I'd better get a picture of this one before it got away:
The tour covered a lot of ground, and we saw and heard about a lot of things. I'll list as many as I can, relying on my memory and my notebook:
Royal Courts of Justice: (w) This is actually just outside the City. It's the home of the High Court and Court of Appeal of England and Wales, which together make up the Senior Courts of England and Wales, second only to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)
This monument stands in front of the building (you can just see in the previous picture):
There's the dragon again, and a statue of Queen Victoria below. An insinuation that the City is superior to the Crown? One wonders...
Inns of Court: (w) In England, lawyers are either barristers, who argue cases in court, or solicitors, who do everything else. Barristers must be members of one of the Inns of Court, which are professional associations with supervisory and disciplinary functions over their members - sort of like the American Bar Association in this country (except membership in the ABA is voluntary, and not all lawyers are members). The Inns also provide law libraries, and some barristers have their chambers (offices) there.
There are four Inns of Court, two inside the City and two outside. The inside ones, which we saw (but I didn't take pictures) are the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple (the other two are Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn). They're called "Temples" because they're part of "The Temple," which was originally the headquarters of the Knights Templar, a religious order in the Middle Ages.
Fleet Street: (w) A major street in the City, formerly the center of Britain's newspaper industry. Today, most of the papers have moved to other locations, but the name "Fleet Street" is still used to refer to the British press as a whole.
Cheshire Cheese: (w) Our guide represented this pub to us as the oldest pub in London; however, the Wikipedia article says there are older pubs, and this web page claims that the oldest pub is the Seven Stars. Whatever. The Cheshire Cheese is still quite old, dating back to 1538. It was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 (more about this below), but rebuilt the next year:
That's Alex, our tour guide, by the way.
Ever helpful, I pointed out that they were going to have to change the sign to add the end date of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and add a new line for King Charles.
The Great Stink: (w) Alex told us the story about how in the summer of 1858, the sewers dumping human waste and industrial waste into the Thames, combined with unusually high heat, caused a big stink - literally. The city hired Joseph Bazalgette, a civil engineer, who led the construction of a new sewer system and cleanup of the river. Terry and I found this particularly interesting, because we had both read a book called The Great Stink by Clare Clark, a historical novel which combines a fictionalization of Bazalgette's story with a murder mystery.
St. Paul's Cathedral: (w) Earlier, I mentioned all the famous London landmarks that aren't inside the City. Well, this is one famous landmark that is:
Seen from a distance
Front view
Along about this time we took a break. I stepped into a convenience store for a drink and was delighted to find that they had Sparkling Ice, a sugarless fruit flavored sparkling water drink that I've recently started drinking. I bought a bottle of Kiwi Strawberry flavor, and was amused to notice that, while the Kiwi Strawberry flavor sold here in the U.S. is colored red, the one in England is green! It tastes exactly the same - I guess they figure us Yanks won't drink anything green.
Bank of England: (w) Nothing to say about it... there it is.
The Royal Exchange: (w) Sounds like it would be a stock exchange; in fact, it's a retail center with shops, restaurants and bars. I was also interested to read in the Wikipedia article that it's "one of the locations where a herald proclaims the new monarch's reign to the public" - an event which happened quite recently!
The Monument: (w) Or more precisely, The Monument To The Great Fire Of London, which happened in 1666. According to Alex the guide, if you were to lie the monument down on its side, its tip would point to the place where the fire started. This sounded a little to cute to be true, and I was skeptical. But according to the Wikipedia article, the monument is 202 feet tall, and it's located 202 feet from where the fire started. So I guess he was telling the truth.
At the base of the column, there's an inscription describing the fire, how it started, and how it was put out. Apparently, the inscription originally included a passage blaming the fire on the Catholics, but that passage has since been chiselled out.
Tower Bridge: (w) The tour ended at the bank of the Thames, from where we had a good view of Tower Bridge - which, as I pointed out earlier, is not inside the City. I was interested to find out that the bridge is a drawbridge, and that there are elevators in the two towers, and you can walk across the upper deck.
I was a little surprised to find out that the bridge was built between 1886 and 1894 - I thought it was much older than that.
After the tour, we went back to the Cheshire Cheese for lunch. Unfortunately, the atmosphere was better than the food:
We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting around and visiting with Lucia's family. In the evening, we went out to a Hungarian restaurant. Unfortunately, it wasn't very good, either. It was not the best day for eating. I did, however, get this picture of one of England's iconic red double-decker busses:
