I arrived at Heathrow Airport on a British Airways flight from Frankfurt at a little after noon, local time. This was my first visit to London (not counting airport transfers) in nearly twenty years. I had last been there at the tail end of a post-undergraduate summer tour through India and Europe. I stayed with distant relatives somewhere out on one of the suburban rail lines, saw a considerable number of plays, and wandered about doing various touristy things. This time I had a weekend to kill somewhere in Europe to fill out the week I needed to take advantage of cheaper fares, the remaining five days having been spent at a workshop in Germany. Paris was too expensive a flight, Barcelona a replay of the last such jaunt. But I could get an open jaw Frankfurt/London for the same price as the Frankfurt round-trip, and a roundtrip Frankfurt-London (one half of which I would throw away) for about 200 CAN extra. I had considerably more experience with art history, and more money to spend, even if I had largely retained the same attitude towards actually spending any.
It was a long walk through the terminal from the gate to the exit, even with the linear "people mover" conveyor belts. I passed through the green customs lane and out the doors, my carryon pack on my back and a small daypack (wallet, camera, ticket) hung over my left forearm. I had about 85 UKP left over, I thought, from a trip to Wales in 1990, but I knew that wouldn't be enough, even though nearly all the cultural things I planned to do were free. I found a bank machine, put in my debit card, and easily drew out 100 UKP. (The pound was worth about 2.25 CAN and about 1.40 USD at this point; I was using a Canadian debit but a US dollar credit card, so I used a conversion factor of 1.5, that being easier to figure.)
Signs advertised a 15-minute express train to London, but it cost 12 UKP and only took me as far as Paddington station to the west of the centre. The subway -- pardon, the Tube -- cost 3.70 and would take me within a kilometre of my hotel. This was not without cost in other ways: to start with, there was chaos in the ticket area (all machines; humans for advice only). I stood in one line for a few minutes only to notice a sign that said "cards only". It wasn't clear to me what cards would work, so I got out of that line and into another in front of a machine that took bills. This was moving incredibly slowly; other machines took coins, and there was a person at a counter offering change. He wouldn't take my old bills. "You need to go to a bank and see if they'll take these," was his advice. I gave him a new bill, got the change, procured my ticket and joined the flow in the direction of the trains. One was waiting, with enough time for me to walk to the front of the train and actually get a seat.
There was a tabloid sitting on the seat next to me; I picked it up and leafed through gossip about people I didn't know, salacious photos, and editorials written in words of one syllable before putting it back down. The woman next to me immediately asked if she could read it. I took out my digital camera as discreetly as I could, put it in my lap, twisted the LCD up so I could see it, and took a picture down the length of the car. Normally, I am not one to incessantly snap or video on trips, though I started taking slides after meeting N, first with an SLR and then a very good point-and-shoot. But on a trip without the family, and with enough storage to take five hundred photos (even without the new flash card), I had a responsibility to document. I wasn't going to disgrace myself; I would turn off the flash, and take pictures as unobtrusively as I could, but I would definitely try to take more than usual.
The trip into the centre took about an hour. I got off at Russell Square, the closest I could get to the hotel without changing lines (which would save me a few hundred metres at best). But I didn't head straight for the hotel; instead, I walked into the nearby Brunswick Centre. I had bought a new digital camera just a week before, and on an Internet forum sight, someone had posted a note about good prices on compact flash cards. The Centre was like a stripmall done entirely in gray concrete; I would have run rapidly in the other direction were it not broad daylight. I found The Flash Centre near the end on the left; their shop looked more like a dispatch office for a photographic agency, with a few overcluttered desks and some shelves crammed with odd equipment. I paid 99 UKP for a 256Mb card, and asked the affable man where I could convert my old pound notes. "Try the Post Office," he suggested.
The Post Office just across the street was not helpful. "Those are really old, mate," said the man who eventually came to the wicket. (Or maybe I imagined him saying "mate".) "You'll have to go to the Bank of England, in the City." I gave it up and walked west to Gower Street, which was a couple of lanes going one-way south, with a number of B&Bs in row houses along the west side of the street. I recognized many of the names from guidebooks and my Internet researches; the one I had chosen, the Ridgemont Hotel, was at 65-67, and had the advantage that it was the cheapest place (33 UKP a night) that I could book without using the phone.
I was given room 14, which turned out to be on the third floor. If I stood in the centre of the room, I could just graze both walls of the shorter side with outstretched arms. The longer side could be walked in four modest steps, but was big enough to hold the single bed, a little counter on which stood a TV, and a sink right across from a small wardrobe, just before the window looking out onto Gower Street. I changed into sneakers from my Gore-Tex boots (it had rained more or less steadily while I was in Germany, but I wouldn't need the boots again on this trip), and rearranged the daypack a bit: paper, guidebook notes, wallet, camera. I was off to the British Museum, just a few blocks south.
The opposite side of Gower Street seemed to be entirely covered in scaffolding, but opposite the preserved/restored Edwardian neatness of Bedford Square, a series of row houses brightened up with windowboxes (later I would see a van for a business that maintained them through the winter basically by replacing the plants every few days) and displaying blue historical plaques naming the famous persons who had occupied them. I turned left along Great Russell Street and into the grounds of the BM, went up the stairs and through the small lobby to emerge into the Great Court.
This had recently been roofed over with a triangular net of glass, and the circle in the centre holding the Reading Room had been reclad in pale stone. The Reading Room itself looked about as I remembered it, though it had more of a feel of a manufactured exhibit than a genuine library (the rest of the British Library had been moved to a new building in a seedy area to the north). There didn't seem to be any free maps of the museum I could carry about, though there were maps on the walls here and there; "visit guides" started at UKP 2.50. I would find myself coming back to the bookstore tucked into one of the alcoves surrounding the Reading Room to pick up one of the guides for sale and figure out where to go next.
I decided to look at the galleries in numerical order, and since entrance was free and the museum was open until 8:30 on Fridays, I would go until I felt like leaving for an early dinner, and then return. As photography was permitted, I took pictures of things that I thought the kids might like to see; normally, I don't bother with photography in galleries and museums, as the reproductions generally available are far better than anything I can do with my measly consumer cameras, but this was an exception. The first visit went like this.
11: Cycladic art. This was a revelation to us when visiting Athens in 1990, but this collection was quite small and specific, the little figures with the stylized faces all being fairly small, with crossed arms. There were no harpists, surprisingly. 12: Minoan. 13: the beginning of Greek art, arranged in cases by region: Athens, Sparta. Corinth was particularly striking, a look I don't remember seeing before, almost Art Deco but more dense. There were many black-figure kraters and kylixes.
14: This was almost a hallway between two larger rooms, with an interesting explanation of the discovery of the red-figure method, and a discussion of its leading proponent, the potter Andokides. 15: red-figure pottery from Greece's greatest period in the fifth century BC. The pices that stood out for me were white-ground, a small pyxis (cosmetic box) and a lekythos (oil flask).
16: This was a passageway with a set of stairs off to the side leading up to a specially-built mezzanine, a small rectangular room, where one could examine up close a frieze from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae. A guard appeared to be permanently stationed there, and he discreetly kept out of my way in the fairly small space. 17: a much larger room, in all dimensions, featuring a reconstruction of the Nereid monument. This was a temple at one end of room several metres high, with benches in front on which one could sit and contemplate, and some statues with flowing drapery at the back. Going around the back of the temple, I found the passageway to the next room, which itself was almost a hallway, and in it was a lone Caryatid from the Erectheum, the small temple on the Acropolis opposite the Parthenon.
In 1982 my classmate John Gross and I had visited the British Museum, but hadn't stayed very long. I remember a mounting anger at what I thought was imperialist plunder, boastfully displayed. He, back in Rome a few weeks previously, had already proclaimed, "I'm sick of churches and I'm sick of art galleries," so he was willing to duck out early. How easy the righteous indignation of the young! The situation was much more ambiguous now. I had been to the Acropolis in '85, seen the four copies of the Caryatids on the Erectheum, and the three remaining originals inside the newly built museum, all their details eaten away by the Athenian air pollution. I had been in western China in '87, and seen caves with sad black-and-white reproductions of the stolen paintings, which had been taken to Berlin and destroyed in the WWII bombings. Now this lonely statue, holding up a cross-beam only there so she'd have something to hold up, devoid of context and purpose.
It was time to go back to the Nereid room and to the right, where the Parthenon galleries were. These contain the Elgin Marbles, the friezes, metopes, and pediment statues removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the middle of war between the Turks and Venetians, whose return has been sought by Greece throughout her modern history.
In a side room, past the point where the audioguides were for sale, a short silent video using computer-generated images was playing, and from this I learned something I didn't know before: that the frieze was around the outside of the inner temple, and consequently in the original setting could only be seen from below at a sharp upward angle. Of course, we were not allowed into the Parthenon anymore.
I walked into the main gallery, which had the frieze along both sides, and galleries at the ends with the metopes and pediment sculptures. The latter were better viewed from afar; close up, some of them looked overblown and awkward. I walked slowly along the frieze, some parts of which were quite damaged, while others appeared fairly intact. This was compositionally much superior to what I had seen earlier in the museum. The basic subject, a pair of processions of mounted riders, would be stupendously dull if done badly, but the horses appeared to be racing, and in very shallow relief their legs were arranged in constantly varying patterns.
A tour group filed into the centre and listened to their guide shouting about what they were about to see. I took this as a sign to continue on the tour, past the lonely Caryatid to the next gallery. 21: monumental statues from the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos. 22: Hellenistic sculpture under Alexander the Great. Already I could sense some lost vitality, and the approach of the Romans, who copied their culture where they could.
23: Roman copies of Greek sculpture, bathing Aphrodites and athletes, with an abrupt and incongruous juxtaposition of some huge Assyrian winged bulls, marking the gateway to a series of rooms with large flat wall friezes from Nineveh. These were considerably less interesting than the Parthenon friezes, though in a better overall state of repair.
I had reached the staircase, and went up to the second floor, putting off the first-floor Asian gallery until later. First were the Egyptian rooms. 63: sarcophagi and mummies. These galleries were quite popular; there wasn't much space to walk between the huge glass cases, and there were signs prohibiting "guiding". The main cases lacked much in the way of explanatory text, and reminded me of the endless parade in the Met in New York; what I found more interesting were the side cases, on secondary topics like paleopathology (deducing facts about the life and death of the mummified humans). 65: Nubia, whose presence here was a welcome departure from the usual Egypt-centric presentation. 62: more mummies and crowds. Here what I liked were the big-eyed Fayum portraits (not as many of them as in the Louvre or Met) and a corpse that had not been mummified, but dehydrated and preserved by hot sand. 61: an interpretive gallery on "understanding ancient Egyptian culture", with cases on different types of writing (including mistakes), aspects of everyday life, and even sex (a papyrus with autofellators and a ceramic of a troll carrying its penis over its shoulder were reminiscent of the almost sniggering collection of Roman erotic artifacts in the Archaeological Museum at Naples).
I was fading at this point. 59: ancient Near East (Levant). 56: ancient Mesopotamia, though many of the best pieces had been removed for an exhibition titled "Agatha Christie and Archaeology", for which I would have had to pay, if I'd been inclined to see it. There was a nice set of cuneiform tablets tracing the development of writing from numerical records and pictographs, starting at about 2500 BC. 55" later Mesopotamia including cuneiform fragments from royal library of Nineveh, each accompanied by a short description for those of us who couldn't read the tiny impressions. These included observations of the planet Venus, on deformed births, bits of epics (such as Gilgamesh), and of course various bureaucratic requests. Ironic that this most despised aspect of life was what led to the development of writing.
73: artifacts of the Greeks in Italy. The kraters and kylixes were definitely coarser, which explained why the ones we had in Naples and Rome the past summer didn't seem as nice as the ones earlier on in this museum. 72: Cyprus. 71: Etruscan, including finds from Cerveteri and Chiusi which brought back memories of our driving around Tuscany in the fall of 1995. My favourites here were the tomb paintings, which are the only evidence we have of the tradition of Greek painting. 70: Rome. Mosaics high on walls, heads of Augustus, tomb portrait sculptures, funerary inscriptions. The Portland vase, a small dark glass vase with a mythological scene done in white, was nice. 69: a Roman interpretive gallery along the same lines as the Egyptian one, for which I did not have the energy. I was done for the time being.
Leaving the museum, I walked a bit north and then west through Bedford Square and into the bustle of Tottenham Court Road, past a cinema and some electronics shops, and then west to Charlotte Street, home to many brightly-painted restaurants. My destination was Rasa Samudra, which turned out to be a half-block south. This is a seafood restaurant specializing in dishes from Kerala in the south of India. There was a menu posted outside; going through it, I got cold feet. Dishes seemed expensive (UKP 6 for starters, 10-15 for mains, 6 for side dishes), and not all that interesting from the brief descriptions.
I decided not to eat there, and hastened towards my second choice, south across Oxford Street and into Soho. There were groups of young loiterers, and people asking for change, all of whom I walked past rapidly and somewhat apprehensively. It was only six on a Friday, and there was still plenty of daylight, but it all seemed slightly frightening. During my 1982 visit, after the Brixton riots, I had a more or less constant sense of danger, but I hadn't expected much tension on this visit. I didn't want to consult my maps, because I couldn't do it discreetly; they were photocopies from guidebooks in a folder in my backpack. So I kept going in more or less the same direction: around the side of Soho Square, and east as far as St. Giles in the Fields. I figured that consulting a map while standing in front of a church founded in 1100 or so was probably safe, and discovered I was fairly close at that point to my destination. A little way down Endell Street I found the Rock and Sole Plaice.
This was, of course, a fish and chips place, with a high counter and menuboard, and a few tables. I sat down at one and was handed a menu. While they had a lot of deep-fried items from which to choose, fish and chips was at the top of the menu, with a choice of cod, haddock, plaice, rock, and skate. The last was the most expensive on menu at UKP 8.00 (two pounds cheaper as takeaway), and I ordered it, plus a small bottle of mineral water. I watched the other patrons: a tourist family, plus some people with English accents, mostly eating just chips. A man in a suit came in with a bottle of Australian shiraz, took the table opposite, and sat sipping his wine and waiting for a supposed companion (who didn't arrive while I was there). My chips were only okay, but the fish was a large slab (with the usual cartilage fan in the centre) and quite nice.
Sated, I walked back to the British Museum. It was supposed to be open until 8:30 on Friday (hence my willingness to leave for dinner before I was thrown out) but to my annoyance, I discovered the hard way that this meant only "selected galleries" were open. The Asian galleries at the back were closed, as was the whole second floor (I was hoping to spend more time in the Greek and Rome interpretive rooms). It turned out only the first floor Egyptian and Roman galleries were open, exactly the ones I had started with. They were worth a second look, being almost empty, with reduced lighting making them darker and moodier. I wandered about absorbing the atmosphere for a while.
Leaving the museum again, I paused to take a night picture, then walked east along Great Russell Street and into the relatively large Theobald's Road, with buses, taxis, and cars hurtling along, and almost no pedestrians. I went up Lamb's Conduit Street, all the way to the end, just before Coram's Fields park, and finally found my destination on the right: the Lamb, a pub lauded by Time Out as one of the most authentic and unspoiled ones around. What I had forgotten was that this meant it would be quite smoky; I hadn't been in a smoke-filled room for a long time. Even in Paris, it was possible to mostly avoid them. I ordered a pint of Young's AAA cask ale, and sat alone at a small table, watching the other patrons (a "mixed crowd", as far as I could tell), and feeling rather silly, for pubs are really for conviviality, not solitary drinking. I wasn't the only one on their own, but older men reading newspapers didn't really count. I finished my pint and left, walking east over much of the territory I had covered on my arrival; just before Gower Street, I saw a large Waterstone's bookstore with ten minutes left before closing. I went in and quickly selected a map of central London, spiral-bound atlas-style; it would fit in my back pocket if necessary, and could be mostly covered by my hands while looking at it.
I walked up to my room. In 1982 I would have been at a movie, or a play, or even a concert. But movies cost UKP 9.50, for which I could buy the DVD a few months later; besides, I would have wanted to see one with at least N and maybe the kids too. There was nothing compelling at the theatre, short of a revival of a Pinter play at the National directed by Pinter himself, but I would have had to spend a fortune on a ticket. I wasn't plugged into music culture enough to select a concert, and in any case that would have required more smoke inhalation. The one thing I could not do at home, ironically enough, was watch TV; we don't have one, but there was one in the tiny hotel room. So I turned it on, poked around the five channels available, and went to bed early, around 9:30.