Londinum was probably a port before it was a fortress: exploring the Thames down to Greenwich

And then there was one. The last full day of the program in Britain, and the last full day in London. Both the English literature group and the history group set off from the Embankment down the River Thames to Greenwich. London was important because it was on an important waterway, and, while we saw sites such as the Tower of London (in the background, here), it was really the docklands to the East of the Tower (the East End) that was most important for our purposes.

Today, the warehouses and docks have closed, to be replaced by upmarket condos, and the Canary Wharf financial district, but, for hundreds of years the East Ends docks were the center of a vibrant community of poorer Londoners.

At Greenwich itself are the buildings designed by Christopher Wren, surrounding one or two buildings of a royal palace, the Palace of Placentia, surviving from the days of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. Under the Stuarts, Greenwich declined until rebuilt by Charles II. But, after the Glorious Revolution, William had little interest in Greenwich, which was built to Wren's design (and largely completed by Hawksmoor). It became a hospital and home for retired sailors, the Royal Naval Hospital. After that it became the Royal Naval College, and, currently, is the home of Greenwich University. I didn't take you all to the Painted Hall in the old Naval College buildings, which was a mistake, but I did a quick run there myself.

• The Painted Hall is a masterpiece of decoration. The artist was Sir James Thornhill, and it took him nineteen years to complete the work, finishing in 1727. He was paid three pounds a square yard for the ceiling and one pound a square yard for the walls. The Hall was designed as a dining room for the pensioners, but proved to small for the population. It was not used for this purpose again until 1939, when the Navy used it as their Mess until 1998. In 1806 the body of Nelson lay in state in the Painted Hall until he was taken upriver by funeral barge for burial at St Pauls Cathedral. (Greenwich Guide)

Next time, you really ought to poke your head in there. Walls and ceilings are all upholding the Glorious Revolution by focusing on William and Mary. I also visited and ate at Goddard's Pie and Eel shop (although I didn't have eels), while most of you had TexMex food. It is one of the last of a kind serving more traditional East End working class hot lunches, but I thought I might have trouble convincing you of the joys of meat pie, mash, and mushy pees with "liquor" (a green flecked clearish white liquid of indertiminate origin). I enjoyed the experience.


What we all seemed to enjoy is hiking up to the Greenwich Observatory, founded and built under Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Observation of the skies was vital for determining latitude and longitude of ships travelling the globe in the 18th century and beyond, as was, for longitude, the exact measurement of time. Greenwich became the home Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), from which all other times zones derived. So, we became quite proficient at taking our picture on the Prime Meridian outside the Observatory.

Prime(-Time) Meridian

(Left) Ray, Amanda, Cassie, Ashley, Kristie, Krystal. (Right) Uhhh, ditto.













(Left)Krystal, Amanda, Cassie, Jessie, Kristi, Ashley, Megan, Kelly, Carrie, Andrea, Ray, Ben, and ? (is that right?)

London: the pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial city?

A quick tour through London's and Britain's past at the Museum of London, Barbican, and the British Galleries of the Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington. I went early to Barbican to find a coffee shop and grade and to walk through Smithfield. Smithfield markets have long been the meat markets of London (here is the storefront of a tripe and offal establishment) from which restaurants and local butchers buy wholesale. (It was also infamous for the "fires of Smithfield," where unrecanting Protestants were burnt under Mary Tudor.)

We then met for a quick tour through Barbican, an area that was basically a large bomb crater after World War II and then was rebuilt into either an ideal urban residential area, or, if you see it that way, a concrete dystopia. The idea was that upper class and lower class flats would be intermingled (as many streets were in the early modern period). At least at its center (as in this photo), I find it more an ideal than a dystopia, but there are some walkways which are vaguely A Clockwork Orange.

Then on to South Kensington and Exhibition Road. At the bottom of Exhibition Road are the Victoria & Albert, the Science, and the Natural History Museum. Dr. Angela McShane-Jones walked us through the British Galleries focusing on the argument made in the panels that there is little to differentiate the Industrial Revolution between 1760 and 1830 from the mass production of the 17th, even 16th centuries. Perhaps one might find a full-fledged industrial revolution from the 1890s or even 1950s, but not, so the argument goes, before. The argument is interesting because it notes that historians have focused on cotton textiles because parliamentary committees focused on the cotton textile factories and, thus, produced reams of documents (which we historians love). But many industries were producing in mass quantities for the market much earlier, but left material culture artifacts not documents. Agree or disagree, the argument and the Galleries provoked thought and discussion (which is amazing because we were quite tired by Wednesday and thinking of flying home on Friday).

Most of us then walked up Exhibition Road towards Albert Memorial. I don;t have much to add about this recently cleaned monument, except to say "what was she thinking!?" Like Barbican, it can be seen as both beautiful and a monstrosity. On our way towards the Memorial in Kensington Gardens, we came to the gates at the end of Exhibitiion Road, which was the place where the Great Exhibition of 1851 (or the Crystal Palace) had been built and opened. The gates are, of course, the Coalbrookdale Gates, and they are still there (though turned 90 degrees so they don't block the road which now goes through the park dividing Kensington Gardens from Hyde Park) as are (in the photo) Ben, Carrie, Ashley, Krystal, Megan, Amanda, Cassie, Derrick, and Raymond.

West of the West End?: Westminster

On Tuesday, our first full day in London, we travelled to Westminster, just a short tube ride away from our hotel. The West End is to the west of central London, obviously, the old "mile square" walled city that now houses the nation's (and one of the world's major) financial districts. (The East End is to the, uh, east.) But the West End was also the area towards (and eventually interfilling the area between London and) Westminster.

Ever since Edward the Confessor, as Dr. Peter Catterall noted, who spent much time and money on refounding and expanding Westminster Abbey, Westminster has been associated with England's and then Britain's governmental center. The Court was at Whitehall Palace (which burned in 1698, leaving only the Banquetting Hall designed by Inigo Jones in the early 17th century), and at St. James's Palace, and, more recently, at Buckingham Palace. The House of Lords and the House of Commons were also at the Palace of Westminster, and the houses of Parliament, also burnt in 1834, so the new Parliament dates from the mid-19th century. (We had a very interesting discussion with a Tory whip and toured the buildings, but, of course, were unable to photograph inside.) From the late 17th or early 18th century, the head of the political party with the most MPs was, more or less, heading the government. In the 1720s and 1730s, that leader of the Whigs was Sir Robert Walpole, and he became known, derisively at first, as the Prime Minister. We visited his Norfolk home, Houghton Hall, which he rebuilt at great expense. But he probably spent more time at his home in Westminster, No. 10 Downing Street. That address has become the home of all Prime Ministers, and it is the non-descript grey building in this photograph (upper right, taken as we walked down Whitehall). One used to be able to walk through Downing Street but security tightened when there was an IRA mortar or missle attack on the building a few decades ago. Whitehall is also the home of the various governmental adminsitration buildings: Cabinet Office, Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence.

But Whitehall and Westminster is also home to many quasi-governmental bodies: offices of political parties, political journalists' offices, offices of solicitors who draft parliamentary legislation, institutes and associations which lobby for particular Acts (or for government to act).
Here is our intrepid group about to turn down Great Peter Street (which I realized by enlarging the photograph). The Institute of Economic Affairs, the Royal Academy of Engineers: these are both on Great Peter Street in Westminster just south of Westminster Abbey, and the work of these various lobbying associations are very important for the working of British government today. If one solely examines government from the perspective of Parliament, one doesn't realize its scope.

Westminster to Greenwich--West End to East End: the metropolis beckons

Greetings. finally catching up with postings regarding the last week. We did not read the novel Brick Lane as did the English literature group. But we did discuss the East End. In any case, we all partook in the adventure of dining in the East End. It was a long series of tables so I include a picture from each end. On the walk to the restaurant, you might have noticed the nearby church (on the corner of Fournier St. and Commericial St. , a block off Brick Lane). It was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (in the 1710s), a student of Christopher Wren (who had designed St. Paul's and the Emmanuel College Chapel we saw). A block further on is The Jamme Masjid or Great London Mosque on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street.

• This building is a perfect illustration of the East End's role as the point of entry for immigrant groups. It was originally founded as a church for Hugenots - French protestants who fled to London to avoid persecution at home. The chapel was later used by Methodists. In the late 19th century, when Whitechapel became the centre of the Jewish East End, it became the Machzike Adass, also known as the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. With the dispersal of the Jewish community and a new influx of Bengali immigrants, it became the Jamme Masjid or Great London Mosque in 1976. (PortCities London)
  

Huguenots, as we discussed, were French Protestants, and many of them had fled France after the Revocation of Nantes in 1685. In any case, the area from Spitalfields to Brick Lane still has the simple 2-3 story buildings with the huge windows on the ground floor. Many of these housed Huguenot silkweavers and their looms (for which intricate work they needed light). I'd like to do more with the history of the Spitalfields area, next program. In any case, it is notable that the Brick Lane area housed Huguenots, working class Methodists, Jews immigrating from continental Europe, and Bengalis in succession from the 18th to the 20th centuries. You might have noticed that, in the 21st century, the area around Brick Lane has gone decidedly upmarket (at least the area around Spitalfield Market). Orwell's "Spikes" are nowhere to be seen.

From Darbys's Coalbrookdale to Dickens' Coketown

(Apologies. Did not have my battery charged for my digital camera so took pictures with a regular camera. I have "borrowed" a couple of pictures from Ashley's site--she does have a great photographer's eye.) The first picture is on the Ironbridge of Ironbridge Gorge, the first bridge made out of iron as one would expect. Abraham Darby began casting it in 1779 and that is the date on the central piece around which the students are gathered. Darby almost went broke as the bridge was a marvel and everyone visited it, but they went back to making bridges out of wood and brick, until a flood towards the end of the century washed out all bridges on the River Severn, except this one.

Even with the success of Ironbridge, the Darbys and their successors soon had to shift from making large practical items to focusing on the ornamental and the decorative. Of course, some of the decorative pieces, like the great gates to the Great Exhibition (Crystal Palace) of 1851 or the iron lamp posts for London, were massive or massive projects. Still, by the mid-19th century, the Darbys sought to market themselves as cast iron artists (and some of the pieces shown in the museums at Ironbridge make iron look like a rare mineral). One of the reasons for the change is that Coalbrookdale and the other places where there were blast furnaces (like Blists Hill) were started because it was a great place to use the river and the canal system to bring in materials (iron ore, coke made from coal, and limestone for the catalyst) from a short distance away. The picture to the right shows a rail bridge crossing the river. The railways were important for the area (iron rails and steam engine boilers were made here and nearby) and also were the undoing of the area (it was too costly to build many railroads in an area cut by rivers, valleys, and canals). One of the reasons that Ironbridge is a World Heritage Site is that there was no modernization after the mid-19th century and much of the place remains as it was during the first Industrial Revolution (or is that Evolution?).

Note: the UNESCO World Heritage List includes 26 sites in the United Kingdom (probably the highest number in any one country), including: Ironbridge Gorge (1986), Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites (1986), City of Bath (1987), Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret's Church (1987), Tower of London (1988), Maritime Greenwich (1997), all of which we have seen or will see (well Tower in passing). If you add Tintern Abbey (as it is very similar to Studley Royal Park including the Ruins of Fountains Abbey, 1986), and the various places many of you have seen or will see--Old and New Towns of Edinburgh (1995), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003), Liverpool, Maritime Mercantile City (2004)--we can say we did a fair portion of the list!

Whose 18th Century?

Moll Flanders and Walpole at the beginning of the century, Pride and Prejudice and Pitt at the end (with Persuasion just around the corner in 1811). A century dominated by the landed aristocracy or a century dominated by the monied interest, merchants, and traders of the metropolis of London? A stable society reinforcing hierarchy or a rich edifice unsteadily topping an ungovernable people?

Bath is there at the beginning and the end of the century, and it could be taken for representing both visions of 18th-century society. For our purposes, one of the great features of Bath, is that it remains largely Hanoverian (indeed, Georgian); in Jane Austen's time here, it must have been one huge builders' site. Here we are walking towards one of the pump rooms, where they are now rebuilding a spa.

Bath was about separating the classes in an infinite hierarchy of status. Thus, Sir Walter wants to be in the best rooms of Camden Place built on the highest hill. But the Royal Crescent, perhaps a built older remains a slightly more prestigious address (seen here to the right). Bath was about mixing the classes, like horse races and gambling spots in London, and exciting place to watch and be watched by others. Moll can meet someone of higher status at the Bath: is it a matter of hiding one's previous status?; or is it that one just doesn't care in Bath (Las Vegas)? Sir Walter separates himself in the highest hill, then spends his time on the street in town watching others of all sorts of ranks.

In retrospect we should have spent a bit more time in Bath after the tour (although many of us set off on explorations in Cardiff and discovered a bit there too the next day). Some tasted the waters, some (me at least) explored the Abbey, did anyone see where Beau Nash lived like I did? The Abbey was chock-full of monuments to departed surgeons, farriers, apothecaries, and military men (as that to the left). Adm. Croft and Capt. Wentworth were fictional characters in Austen's Bath only in name it appears.