It's been a while since I last posted. This is mainly due to the fact that Wix has changed its access for photos, and I can no longer create photo albums, and I don't want to start a new blog just for the last few months we'll be living here. But I have found a workaround, which is to copy and paste photos onto my blog. I'm not sure why that works, but I'll use it for now. Every platform wants to limit your photos storage. I guess it's understandable as they have to make a profit, but it's frustrating as even Google Photos is so limited now that I no longer have access to my work/student accounts through the university, so I can't even create an album there and share a link here. I've discovered I have enough space in my Flickr account, so I'm hoping I can have the last few months of travel in there and won't run out of space for that. I want it to be accessible to people who aren't on Facebook or who don't frequent it.
Another reason for my long absence has just been plain busyness. My brother and nephews came to visit during half term break, so we did stuff but were busy with visiting, and then the remainder of the school year was upon me. I also was gone for a week back to Edmonton so we could hopefully find and buy a house (and we were able to!) for when we move back. Then there was tons of end of the year marking for me, visiting with my brother as he popped in and out during his Europe trip this year, using our place as a base, and also just using some of the evenings preparing for the move, getting things set up for the house like utilities and what not. Since my job ended, I've been trying to use my time to continue to be productive but also do last minute sightseeing, doing things that I find interesting while my husband is at work, things that he is less interested in. But between having a bit of downtime and the realisation that I can use Flickr to at least share some albums, I figured I might as well get blogging again for the last few entries of our life living in Europe. As I always do when I have several different little things to write about, these are organised in order of when we did them to help separate them since you might not want to read them all or not be able to read them all at once. I suspect this will be a rather long post by the time I finish writing it. Oh, and one note on photos. What I've done is created a link to the photo album for the first photo I post in each subheading. This way you can click on the photo and be taken to the album to see the rest of the photos.
Kensington House and Gardens
Just before mid-June, we decided to see Kensington House. We'd bought memberships to the English Heritage Trust for the year because of all the family visiting, and it gave us discounts on our visits to other palaces and royal venues, so we figured we might as well see the last main place we hadn't been to yet before our membership expired. Frankly, we were pretty disappointed. You don't get to see anything but whatever is on exhibit, which at the time we went was something on royal fashion through the ages, and we weren't interested. We thought at least the rooms the displays were in would have some info about the room itself, but there was nothing, so we really felt it a bit of a waste. We saw a few jewelled pieces that we thought were really beautiful, and that was about it. Afterward, we decided to check out the Princess Diana Memorial Gardens, and that was much more enjoyable. It's not huge, but it's really well done. We only wished we could go inside the garden, but it looks like it's only meant to be viewed from the various viewing platforms.
The Wallace Collection
Our next trip was to the Wallace Collection in London. I'd heard about this place from a work colleague, and it sounded like somewhere we'd enjoy seeing, so off we went on the weekend. It was quite an interesting collection of paintings and other artefacts. After watching a show on the BBC called "Fake or Fortune" where the hosts research art pieces that people have with unclear artists who made them, I came to learn about a painter called Canaletto who painted gorgeous cityscapes and buildings in Italy. There were several Canaletto paintings there. The museum is also on the Anglo-Sikh Heritage Trail due to some of the artefacts in their collection from Sikh militaries as well as a jewelled dagger once owned by Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. Not that the Mughals were Sikhs, but their history is entwined with Sikh history. I would include a link to the Anglo-Sikh Heritage Trail so you could learn more about it, but there's nothing to share! The website is supposedly under construction, and it sends you to their Facebook page, which gives almost no more information. There's nothing useful under the "About" section on the page, so I'll just have to use my own guess as to what it is. I mean, I think I have a good idea, being artefacts related to Sikh history, but it would be nice to know about how the Trail began and what it does as an organisation. In any case, some of these items jump out to me more than they might have in the past as I've become very interested in Empire, especially as the British Empire existed during the British Raj.
Moving on, the Wallaces were collectors of a wide range of artefacts from various parts of the world, and I was also interested to see how there were paintings representing black people as well as people in the Middle East, or at least the "Orient" as it would have been called and understood back in the day. Due to the same show, "Fake or Fortune", I also became more aware of how such people are typically represented in art, and they are usually in the background or the shadows, or on the side. They are almost always marginal characters, so whenever you see one as the centrepiece or depicted otherwise in a positive way, it's remarkable and noteworthy.
National Portrait Gallery
We were excited when we discovered that this museum had re-opened. It was closed the entire time we were here for renovations, and we'd heard it was a fine collection and well worth seeing, so we anticipated not getting to see it while we lived here. However, we were delighted when we found out it had recently opened again. While the collection is quite astonishing, the gallery itself is too famous, I think, or perhaps it was just unusually busy due to the recent re-opening, but there was actually so many people there that it was hard to enjoy. I did, however, manage to capture quite a few photographs, many of which are interesting to me because they are people I admire or people whose lives are interesting to me. In some cases I learned about certain people for the first time, such as a group of ladies who became travel writers, something very uncommon for their day and not necessarily accepted at the time for women to do. The album for this one is a bit bigger than it probably should be--indeed, my husband will probably wonder why I included so many photos, but remember that they are not all just photos of the portraits, but I include descriptions for most of them in a separate photo. That's how I'm going to justify it anyway. Scroll on through or skip them if you don't want to see!
Corps Day 2023
Something I don't have good photos of, and which I think I wouldn't be allowed to post so publicly anyway, was our day at Corps Day. We've attended this for the past couple of years, being guests of the British Intelligence Corps at their HQ at RAF Chicksands, but what made this year special is that Princess Anne was assigned the role of Commander in Chief of the branch after Prince Philip died, and so she attended the event, and I got to meet her in person! I'm far from a royalist, but it's quite an honour to get to attend an event where a royal is and be one of the people who gets to meet with her. She was really lovely. We weren't allowed to ask questions, but she did ask us questions and mentioned that she had been to Edmonton before for an agriculture conference and that she found it very cold at -11ºC in November. I don't blame her; that would indeed be very cold for a Brit! The photo here has no link, just in case you click and think something went wrong. I've posted photos of this place before and didn't have anything new to add.
Brick Lane
We finally made it out to Brick Lane. I had been here several years ago but couldn't really remember what it looked like, and I was mainly there for the vintage market, not realising it was also the main place where the Bangladeshis from Sylhet settled. The history of the area is fascinating, and I'd also hoped to try the bagel place (spelled beigel here) that's really famous there, but we haven't made it yet. I've been there now on a couple of occasions to eat Bengali/Bangladeshi food. It doesn't have the feel of Southall where you feel like you're in India, but it still has a strongly Asian feel to it - people from the restaurants try to flag you down to get you to try their restaurant, offering you 20% discounts, set meal prices, or other options to try to get you to eat there. It's entertaining. There are also a variety of lovely murals in the area, too. Compared to Tooting, however, I still prefer it for Indian food. There aren't the same options as on Brick Lane, as you'll only find Punjabi or South Indian food, but it's cheaper and just as tasty. However, each neighbourhood has such character, and it's definitely worth a visit, or perhaps more!
Bodleian Library, Oxford
The school where I taught ended on July 14 for the summer, so I had a number of days free to do things on my own while my husband was still at work. I used one of those days to meet up with a friend I had met through the job I had the previous year with the military family support office, as she and I are both moving back to Canada this year, and we thought it would be nice to see each other again before we go. Although she lives in Wales, it's still closer and more convenient to get together here than it will be once we're back in Canada since she and her husband will be in Ottawa. So we decided to go to Oxford, where she hadn't yet visited.
I've been to Oxford now a few times, but one place I hadn't yet been to was the Bodleian Library. It was closed when we went there a couple of years ago due to the pandemic, and then when I went last year with my brother, he had wanted to see the History of Science Museum. What I didn't realise was that when I was at that museum, it was right next to the Bodleian Library! Not that we would have had time to go anyway, but I was able to find it quite easily, having been to the area before.
The only way you can access the library is by taking a guided tour, but there were none available online. The website said that more tickets are made available on the day, and I found out when I got there that they don't sell online tickets in the summer due to high volumes of tourists, so it's just first come, first served. Well, we were evidently not the first to come. The only tours left available before our trains departed were 15-minute ones (they offer 30-, 60-, and 90-minute tours as well), so we got what we could. It's better than not getting in at all, but a fuller one with more information would have been better. The 15-minute tour only gives you access to the Duke Humfrey part of the library, and it's just basically a person who ensures nothing is damaged or take, but it's not an informational tour. We did ask the lady questions and she knew stuff, but nothing was offered automatically, so that was a bit disappointing. For an extra small fee, you also get access to the Divinity School, which doesn't appear to be used for anything other than a museum now but was at one time the oldest school room at the university. In any case, the building and structure is beautiful, and it's neat to think of all the people who have studied there and might have entered the same rooms as you just did when you get there. Oxbridge especially has historically been a bit of an old boys club, though many notable women have since studied there. If you're interested, you can browse through the list of names of famous Oxonians. Names that jumped out to me were Nigella Lawson, a British chef I like, John Donne, one of my favourite poets, and former Canadian Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester B Pearson. Of course, I love CS Lewis but already knew that he studied there--as well as taught there. I also included a photo of a list of benefactors of the library, people who donated works to it, and one of them happened to be Oliver Cromwell, Britain's first Prime Minister in the 1600s. One final note on the library is how when you walk into the courtyard, there are multiple entrances in each corner of the square that lead, or at least led at one time, to the section of books for that discipline. There was astronomy, medicine, languages, theology, all sorts of different disciplines. I thought it was really neat.
To fill out our trip, we spent some time at Blackwell's Bookstore, and then we popped into the Weston Library (photo album here), where there were some free exhibits, one on letters as art and the other called Books and Gifts, featuring various books and written works that were given as gifts. The only one I really need to mention here is one where I missed the description of it, having moved my camera too quickly and thus fuzzing out the words in the photo. It's called the Geneva Bible, and it has velvet and jewels on it, a gift to Queen Catherine I. We took a few photos on our walk back to the train station, and I came across one that is now used for something else but that had India Institute on it. With my Empire interest, I had to know more, and I found out that it was created at Oxford for the study of Indian literature and culture. Some people wanted to learn this out of personal interest but others would have had business interests, undoubtedly. An old academic city such at this, Oxford is such a great place to spend time if you like learning about the history of learning in general.
Freud Museum
I learned a couple of days before I went that there is a museum about Freud in London. I hadn't realised he lived here, but he came as a Jewish refugee! As someone with a degree in psychology, I couldn't leave without seeing this place. It's not because I'm a huge fan of Freud. Indeed, his theories have pretty much all been debunked; they were based on his treatment of 6 patients, all of whom relapsed, and it put into question whether he really knew what he was talking about. But as my clinical psychology professor pointed out, he really revolutionised the field because ever since him, people have been trying to prove or disprove his theories, so he has had a lasting and significant impact on psychology.
What was fascinating about this place was that it was pretty much all his stuff from his home and office in Vienna. He had been reluctant to even move from there even after the Anschluss, because it was the only home he had ever known. He didn't want to leave his beloved city or country, and it was only after his dearest and youngest daughter Anna was taken in by the SS for questioning that he realised he had to move the family for their safety. Having treated and befriended a descendent of Napoleon, Marie Bonaparte, she was able to arrange for him safe passage for his family and his things to London. He was 82 at the time and only ended up being there a year he died in London. The reclining chair shown in the photo is the chair, the famous one that all his patients would lie in. He was a great collector of antiquities, which he acquired from all over the world, and his interest in other cultures caused him to read ethnographies being produced by anthropologists at the time and led him to theorise, using psychoanalysis, explanations for why the societies and cultures were the way they were described in this writings. There were other points of interest for me in the house as well. One was a little grave for one of their dogs. They loved dogs and always had a couple of them at a time as pets, and one of them is found in the backyard. I also learned that they are related to Lucien Freud, a well-known painter. There was recently an exhibit on this person at one of the museums here, and I didn't realise he was Sigmund's grandson. There's a palm tree painting of his in Anna Freud's room. There is also a Dali in the house, a portrait of Freud. Dali apparently idolised Freud and psychoanalysis, saying that he thought it was inspiring. He met Freud when the family were passing through Paris on on their journey to London. Apparently the meeting didn't go too well because Freud often had really poor hearing, and it was particularly bad on the day Dali met him, so he couldn't have much of a conversation. Finally, Freud's house in Vienna is also now a museum, but I wonder what it has to see. Apparently all his stuff was brought over to help make him feel more comfortable and more at home, to prevent him from being sad and homesick. Yet my clinical psych prof said that he went to that Vienna museum and that there are some of Freuds collections there, once of which is a collection of fertility gods and other phallic items that are supposedly in front of the chair. My prof said that they were in front of the chair and that if you were staring at those while talking to Freud, it's no wonder all Freud's theories were about sex. But if that chair was in London, what was in Vienna? Perhaps they included a replica? It seems plausible anyway.
After Freud died, his daughter Anna occupied it until her death in 1986. It was her wish that the house be dedicated to preserving the memory of her father and his work, so that's what happened.
The Courtauld Gallery
I mentioned earlier the show called "Fake of Fortune", and it's also where we found out about this place because they often bring paintings to the Courtauld Institute for forensic analysis. I had researched it to learn that there are a bunch of impressionist pieces housed there, so of course I had to go. While this museum isn't free, it's well worth the price when you find out there are practically no tourists there. It was a breath of fresh air, and we enjoyed several gorgeous pieces as wound our way up the spiral staircase. They have a large collection of Rubens as well as the largest collection of Cézannes in the UK. There are even a couple of van Goghs, including the famous one with his bandaged head after cutting off his ear. My favourite of the museum was one by Renoir, whose works I like but usually less so than Monet and van Gogh, but this one just had colours in such a way that it moved me and made me teary. That doesn't happen very often! We also learned that the Courtauld was the premier place to see art exhibitions, the it place for those into art. And apparently you had to really love and have a scholarly interest to be let in. This wasn't a place for public viewings, only for those with a keen interest and learned approach to art.
Bramah's Tea & Coffee Walk
In 2006 when I visited London, I went to visit Bramah's Coffee & Tea Museum, a place that highlighted 400 years of history in the coffee and tea industry in the UK. I learned a lot there, and I was really disappointed that it had since closed down. After mentioning it to one of our Canadian neighbours, she found out there was this book that you could buy so that at least you could still enjoy some learning about this topic as you walk around the city. I believe it was the first book I bought when we moved to London, but I must admit I hadn't yet cracked it open, so I decided I had better do so and take myself out for a walk before we move back. What I learned is that it was intended to be a self-guided tour that you could do in a loop, starting at the museum itself, which is located by the famous Borough Market (and is now a Leyland hardware store). The area itself, I learned, has been busy for generations, being the heart of coffee houses (those were in fashion before tea was popular) and the site of reception for all the tea that was coming into England when they started bringing it back from China and later India. In addition, there was a lot of activity around the hops industry, at least locally. The Hops Exchange is right next to Borough Market and is where people would have been buying and selling hops for the beer industry. It's a beautiful building with an even more stunning interior, which you can't actually get inside because it's for employees only and there's security, but at least you can peek through the windows of the doors. Hay's Wharf (now Galleria) was where tea would arrive, with boats pulling right up to it, just east of London Bridge (you can see the bridge in the background in the photo gallery--if you're wondering why there's no towers on it, that's because it's a common misconception; the bridge with the towers is actually called Tower Bridge, and it's near the Tower of London whereas London Bridge is where people would enter the city and while old, is rather unremarkable in appearance). Eventually the boats that started coming were tea clippers. The clippers were designed to be faster and more capable of sailing during monsoon season, which meant they could make more trips per year than just the one trip they could do with bulkier boats not being able to travel safely at that time. Up to 14,000 chests of tea would be offloaded from one boat a day, with boats trying to dock at about 4am so they could offload the entire cargo by 10am the next day. Walking across London Bridge, you could see the pool where the boats would gather, as well as Custom House where the ship's captain had to apply for a license to dock and record their cargo as well. Once you're across the bridge, the tour takes you mostly to coffee houses, or at least former sites of them, and then you can see the site of where the East India Company had their headquarters as well as the old storage warehouses. To get there, you walk through Leadenhall Market, which has had a food market there since the Middle Ages and was right next to East India House where it's said that people at the market were sure to hear the tea auction, people shouting out prices and such. It was disappointing to see that the building is no more, the East India Company. The book doesn't make it clear that the building is gone, just that Lloyd's Insurance took it over, so I thought the building was still there as it was a large building. I was actually a bit annoyed because this was only going to feed my Empire interest, but I Googled it and learned that after the government took control of India away from the East India Company, the building was destroyed in 1861--so it was far from a recent destruction to make way for the tubular steampunk design of the Lloyd's Tower.
Crossing into that area where Monument is (it's the monument built by London's famous architect Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire in 1666 that destroyed so much of London), the tour book says that much of the opulence of the buildings around there can be attributed to the wealth that the tea industry provided to England. So I took some street photos to just demonstrate what the area looks like in places. It's dotted with modern buildings, but many of the old, regal looking buildings still exist. In addition, there are little alleyways where coffee houses used to be, though some of the plaques to tell you where they were are now gone. When the book was written, it even says that the alleys or areas are closed for renovation, and sadly, the plaques have been renovated right out. The other place that was really interesting to me was St Mary Woolnoth Church next to the Royal Exchange. The church houses a plaque to Edward Lloyd, a member of the church, and the one that started the insurance company, and who opened a coffee shop around the corner from the church (one of the ones that no longer has a plaque). The coffee house was actually the site of Lloyd's Insurance foundations because Lloyd would meet clients in need of mariners insurance there so they could chat over coffee. That small coffee shop, now gone, is now two huge towers on and across the street from that East India House. How incredible! The surprising thing about the church to me, though, was seeing a plaque to John Newton. If you don't know, he is the composer of the well-known hymn "Amazing Grace." He had been a slave owner who, convicted by his faith, turned the other way and became a vociferous abolitionist. He also happened to become the rector of that church for 28 years! It was really a surprise to me to come across that and quite special.
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So you can see that it's been quite busy. We are leaving in 3 weeks and are fitting in our last set of travels in the region before we go, heading out to the Shetland Islands for a few days. I'm also going to visit a friend in Cambridgeshire the day after we get back, so I'll have a few new tales and photos, but that will otherwise be it for our life in London.