After boxing day, Megan, Carol, and I headed back into London on a very, very early morning train, which took a bit longer than it should have, as there were various delays due to electrical issues or something. At the train station, Carol headed off to catch her flight back to Tennessee, while Megan and I dropped our bags off at the hotel before heading out into the city.
While waiting for the tube at Paddington, Megan and I had a conversation an about how complicated the whole thing looks, and how we so wouldn't want to have to try and fix it.
I also enjoy the wee sketchy gas meter hut.
We took the tube up to Kings Cross, where we stood in quite a long line of other huge nerds for the privilege of having our picture taken at...
Platform 9 3/4!
The ceiling in King's Cross is quite cool.
So I got this picture. Totally worth the wait. They have an actual photographer there who takes photos, but they don't make you buy the ones they take, and you can take your own photos, which is nice. Anyways, you can't tell how excited I am right?
We went into the shop after that, because I kind of wanted a Ravenclaw scarf (according to Pottermore, that is my official house) but they were ridiculously expensive, so I got a Ravenclaw mug and declared that I would knit my own scarf.
I'm still amused by all the tube signs.
Got off the tube near Waterloo train station and crossed the Thames to go to Westminster Abbey. After being assured it was worth the cost, we paid to go inside (I got a student discount though, which was cool).
There was a long line to get in, but it moved very quickly.
You aren't allowed to take photos inside the Abbey, so I don't have any photos of the Abbey other than more from the outside. However, suffice to say I was completely geeking out over various dead people, including
Charles Darwin,
Isaac Newton (we finished the tour without having seen his grave, so we asked one of the cardinals (?) if we'd missed his tomb, and he replied "no, you haven't missed it, you're looking right at it" - sure enough we'd just breezed on past it, too distracted by the alter I guess (to be fair, it was half behind a christmas tre- yeah, no, no real excuse)),
Elizabeth I,
Mary Queen of Scots,
George Frideric Handel, and I pretty much died when we got to the
Poet's Corner I was freaking out so much. I'm kind of amazed I didn't start crying I was so worked up.
Poets' Corner is the name traditionally given to a section of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey because of the high number of poets, playwrights, and writers buried and commemorated there.
The first poet to be interred in Poets' Corner was Geoffrey Chaucer in 1556. Over the centuries, a tradition has grown up of interring or memorialising people there in recognition of their contribution to British culture. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the honour is awarded to writers.
Again, not allowed to take photos, but you can see some on
google images. It was rather strange, in the Abbey, to be walking over people's graves - the only floor marker you are not allowed to walk on is that of
The Unknown Warrior (an unidentified First World War soldier), which was surrounded with poppies.
I was standing over the graves of people like Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Edmund Spenser, and Alfred Tennyson, and basically freaking out. They also had memorials to Jane Austen, William Blake, the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Browning, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll (his plaque was *very* cool looking), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, John Keats, D.H. Lawrence, C.S. Lewis, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare (probably one of the biggest and coolest memorial in the corner), Percy Shelley, Oscar Wilde, and William Wordsworth... basically I was loosing my little English-major mind. It was amazing. Totally worth it. Westminster as a whole was amazing and totally worth it, and if you are ever in London, I highly, highly recommend going.
While there, we also went into the little museum (aka gift shop in disguise, since the whole building is its own museum), but it houses the
Westminster Retable, the oldest known panel painting altarpiece in England, which is estimated to have been painted in the 1270s in the circle of Plantagenet court painters, for Westminster Abbey, very probably for the high altar. It is thought to have been donated by Henry III of England as part of his Gothic redesign of the Abbey. The painting survived only because it was incorporated into furniture between the 16th and 19th centuries, and much of it has been damaged beyond restoration. According to one specialist, the "Westminster Retable, for all its wounded condition, is the finest panel painting of its time in Western Europe."
So that was obviously super cool and interesting all but...
Look at how
sassy St. Peter is! As Megan put it: "Mhm gurl, you know you've been bad, donneven, you just turn right around and head on to hell"
Megan and I spent some time wondering how frequently they change the straw in that basket.
#tourist
Canadian High Commission selfies!
There - here's one so you can actually see the flags.
Trafalgar Square (which you may remember from previous posts about London)
The iphone panorama feature might be one of the best things I discovered on this trip (photo credit to Megan though, as my phone had died by this point). We went into the National Gallery, thinking it was the National Portrait Gallery, and were then very confused by the lack of portraits. Turns out the portrait gallery is inside the national gallery, but at the back of the building, so we missed it.
More of the majestic giant blue cock.
The Christmas tree in Trafalgar square is an
annual gift from the people of Oslo (starting in 1947).
And back to Paddington!
The next day we headed out to check out the
Highgate Cemetery, which Carol had recommended visiting.
Shout out to Sherlock Holmes!
Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England. It is designated Grade I on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. It is divided into two parts, named the East and West cemetery. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves at Highgate Cemetery. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as well as for its de facto status as a nature reserve.
This side of the road was the newer section of the cemetery...
While this side was the old, and guarded by a chapel. The old part was only available by guided tour, which Megan and I elected to go on. Our tour guide was an old man, who was certainly not the most interesting tour guide I've ever had, but the cemetery was very interesting all on its own (he noted at the end of the tour that he hoped he hadn't made too much light of a serious subject, and I was like oh hun, I've had tour guides make me near tears with their stories of executions, don't worry).
The cemetery in its original form – the northwestern wooded area – opened in 1839, as part of a plan to provide seven large, modern cemeteries, known as the "Magnificent Seven", around the outside of central London. The inner-city cemeteries, mostly the graveyards attached to individual churches, had long been unable to cope with the number of burials and were seen as a hazard to health and an undignified way to treat the dead. The initial design was by architect and entrepreneur Stephen Geary.
On Monday 20 May 1839, Highgate Cemetery was dedicated to St. James by the Right Reverend Charles Blomfield, Lord Bishop of London. Fifteen acres were consecrated for the use of the Church of England, and two acres set aside for Dissenters. Rights of burial were sold for either limited period or in perpetuity. The first burial was Elizabeth Jackson of Little Windmill Street, Soho, on 26 May (I have a picture of her grave later on).
It might not have been the most thrilling of tours, but I did learn a lot about grave symbolism. Pretty much all of them have something to do with Christianity (anchor as the anchor of Christian faith, fabric draped over urn as a soul left for heaven, lamb on a child's grave symbolizing purity, something that looked like a dollar sign but was actually an H, S, and an I, which represents the Greek letters Iota, Eta and Sigma, superimposed on top of each other. These are the first three letters of the name of Jesus in Greek).
Highgate, like the others of the Magnificent Seven, soon became a fashionable place for burials and was much admired and visited. The Victorian attitude to death and its presentation led to the creation of a wealth of Gothic tombs and buildings. It occupies a spectacular south-facing hillside site slightly downhill from the top of the hill of Highgate itself, next to Waterlow Park. In 1854 the area to the east of the original area across Swains Lane was bought to form the eastern part of the cemetery. This part is still used today for burials, as is the western part. Most of the open unforested area in the new addition still has fairly few graves on it.
There are a few new graves in the East side, which we were not permitted to take pictures of (there were far more new graves in the Dissenters area than the Anglican one). English Dissenters were of course Christians who separated from the Church of England in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.
The cemetery's grounds are full of trees, shrubbery and wild flowers, most of which have been planted and grown without human influence. The grounds are a haven for birds and small animals such as foxes.
The large tomb in this picture belonged to the family of bellmakers, the London firm of Lester and Pack, to design the Liberty Bell, as well as the Big Ben bell.
The tombstone shadowed by the bushes (not the one covered in plants) is the tomb of the graveyard's first occupant.
The Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon (topped by a huge Cedar of Lebanon) feature tombs, vaults and winding paths dug into hillsides.
The tombs and vaults in this area took quite a while to fill up, both because they were very expensive and also because many people saw their design as quite pagan and sacrilegious.
The upside-down torches symbolize a flame that will never go out, aka the soul in heaven.
This area was probably the coolest in the cemetery - cut into the earth was a giant circle, topped with a tree that had been there before the graveyard was, and is still alive today (I think the guide said it was about 250 years old).
Cremations were just starting to come into fashion (but not really, since many people still believed in fully body resurrection), so the cemetery has its very own (tiny) vault for cremations.
This is the tomb of
George Wombwell (topped with a statue of his lion Nero), a famous menagerie exhibitor in Regency and early Victorian Britain. He founded Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie.
Originally a shoemaker, when a ship from South America brought two boas to London docks, he bought them for £75 and began to exhibit them in taverns. He soon made a good profit.
Wombwell began to buy exotic animals from ships that came from Africa, Australia and South America, and collected a whole menagerie and put them on display in Soho. In 1810 he founded the Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie and began to tour the fairs of Britain. By 1839 it totalled fifteen wagons, and was accompanied by a brass band.
His travelling menagerie included elephants, giraffes, a gorilla, a hyena, kangaroo, leopards, 6 lions, llamas, monkeys, ocelots, onagers, ostriches, panthers, a rhino ("the real unicorn of scripture"), 3 tigers, wildcats and zebras. However, because many of the animals were from hotter climes, many of them died in the British climate. Sometimes Wombwell could profitably sell the body to a taxidermist or a medical school, other times he chose to exhibit the dead animal as a curiosity.
On one occasion Prince Albert summoned him to look at his dogs who kept dying and Wombwell quickly noticed that their water was poisoning them. When the prince asked what he could do in return for this favour, Wombwell said, "What can you give a man who has everything?". However, Wombwell requested some oak timber from the recently salvaged Royal George. From this he had a coffin fashioned for himself, which he then proceeded to exhibit for a special fee (a coffin which he was then buried in when he died).
We went into the catacombs, but as they are technically open graves, he requested we not take photos (it was proper creepy, though we didn't see any bones, there were rotting coffins falling apart all over the place, and tombs on all the walls).
This was the grave of
Tom Sayers, an English bare-knuckle prize fighter. There were no formal weight divisions at the time, and although Sayers was only five feet eight inches tall and never weighed much more than 150 pounds, he frequently fought much bigger men. In a career which lasted from 1849 until 1860, he lost only one of sixteen bouts. His tomb is guarded by the stone image of his mastiff, Lion, who was chief mourner at his funeral.
This statue was recently found by the caretakers of the cemetery, and is carved from a single piece of Italian marble.
This entry may actually train me to spell it as 'cemetery' and not 'cemetary'.
Maybe.
After this, we headed into the West cemetery, where we just did a quick look at the couple of tombs we were interested in, as we were about done looking at dead people at this point. We went to the grave of
Douglas Adams, who I didn't even know was dead, so that was pretty upsetting. Adams was of course the fantastic writer who wrote A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which are hilarious books. His grave is very unassuming though, so we missed it and had to backtrack a bit.
I did leave my pen at his grave though, which felt appropriate.
We then saw the very large grave of
Karl Marx (boss). You may know him for writing The Communist Manifesto, but he was also a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and has influenced much of subsequent economic thought.
Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.
The large gravesite was built for him later though, by supporters, so we walked through a sketchy little side-path through a lot of mud (I still have dead-people-mud on my boots) to see his original grave stone...
Which was far more understated.
After that we headed back into the centre of London.
Hotel selfie! (my makeup was just really awesome that day - also, check out the awesome scarf Megan gave me for Christmas)
We had sushi at Sushi Yo! in Paddington station, which was quite fun. You can either order specific dishes...
... or grab a dish you think you'd fancy off the conveyer belt as it passes by. The bowls are colour coded by price, and it was just really fun.
They also sent round a ghost to time the rotations or something.
Of course, had to take a picture with
Paddington Bear.
After that we met up with Melissa and did one of the most hardcore fangirl things I have ever done, and waited for three hours outside the theatre where
David Tennant was playing Richard II to see him. I didn't get a picture with him (I got too nervous to ask), but I did get his signature!
Selfie with the mayor of London (we were trying to mimic his face).
So much happy :)
And the next day, I was flying off to Paris while Megan was zooming along under the English channel by train, also to Paris (we both randomly ended up in Paris for New Years).
