Did that just happen?

London has given me some remarkable experiences. The Olympic Opening Ceremony springs to mind. As does one memorable morning on the Thames. And recently, London served up an episode so astonishing that it left Piran and I sitting in a pub three hours later, staring into our pints, shaking our heads, and occasionally giggling in disbelief.

As one does, Piran had put some old stone carving tools up for sale on eBay and ended up meeting a lovely guy named Tim, who turned out to know a great deal about chisels. This was because Tim is not merely a trained mason (already off-the-scale cool) but also employed as a stone mason at St. Paul's Cathedral.

I am completely delighted at the thought that: 1. There are still people who train to become stone masons and 2. Places like St. Paul's and other cathedrals have such people on staff. So when Piran revealed Tim had offered a "behind-the-scenes tour of stone masoning and bits and bobs" at St. Paul's and asked if I was interested, I think any Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Reader can guess that my answer was "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!"

I've already blogged about St. Paul's Cathedral. But this visit to St. Paul's was... well, you'll see. Tim met us outside the main steps but quickly ushered us to an underground back entrance where we signed in and got special visitor's passes. Tim then employed his impressive set of skeleton keys to whisk us through a "Staff Only" door into the crypt and straight to a previously unknown-to-me lift up to the triforium level without climbing the 141 steps involved in the public tour.

The triforium is the area above the side aisles of a church, and though I've toured St. Paul's triforium before, this was much better. For one thing, it was just me and Piran and Tim. There was no timeline, no badge-wielding tour guide on a schedule, and, best of all, no irritating other people. And Tim seemed to be in no hurry (it was his afternoon off) all the while providing an unscripted, sometimes slightly acerbic, and completely absorbing commentary on the cathedral, the stonework that's everywhere, and stone masonry in general.

We saw the shelves stacked with seemingly random bits of Old St. Paul's (before the Great Fire), which were charmingly labelled by period/architectural style - Gothic, Norman, etc. the same way Tesco might label shelves "Eggs, Flour, Sugar, etc."

And we got to see inside the library, currently closed because they're just finishing renovations. It's "a complete and untouched Wren designed interior" and houses manuscripts dating back to the 13th century.

We also got into the Trophy Room, which houses Wren's famous Great Model. Oddly, this is not actually the design that was used in the end, and there are no good records that indicate exactly why it was rejected, despite having taken ten months to design and a year of master carpentering to build. 

It's really big. Big enough that there's actually a tiny door in the side of the plinth it sits on that allows you to crawl in and poke your head up - Gulliver-like - into the inside of the model, where you can see that the interior is also finished. Tragically, Tim did not have the key to the tiny door, but we forgave him, and I suspect he has since rectified that lack in his key ring.

After the library and the Great Model, we paused briefly at the top of the Geometric staircase, and then proceeded to the north side of the triforium, past the large west gallery window. This is the spot where they stuff a gigantic Christmas Tree though a small bit of the window and set it up on the outer balcony-ish level every year. The tree itself is hoisted up from a point in the ceiling of the cathedral where we could just see a heavy hook dangling from what must have been a chain motor in the roof.

Around the corner, "this is where they keep the spare pulpits". Of course. Because you're St. Paul's Cathedral. You're not just going to have one lousy pulpit are you?

A little further along the magic keys were produced again and we popped out onto the trumpeter's gallery. Which is exactly what it says on the tin - the place where trumpeters stand to blow fanfares when the monarch arrives, or for whatever other thing might require a fanfare. (The Changing of the Pulpits, perhaps?) There we could look down at the public in the nave of the church.

Then it was on to the collections room, a dusty assemblage of old models, plaster bits, signage, and of course more random bits of stone. As Tim rightly said, "This is just genuinely full of interesting things."

I particularly like this photo, so even though I have no idea what these stones were, I'm including it.

And this may be a carving by Grinling Gibbons, the most famous English wood carver ever.  Best known for his intricate swags of greenery, "it was said a pot of carved flowers above his house in London would tremble from the motion of passing coaches". (Thanks as always, Wikipedia.)

And this has a lovely tone, don't you think? I wonder what sort of extreme measures the Dean and Chapter were considering as a punishment for foolish scribbling? Hopefully it involved dangling from the Christmas Tree hook.

This is the point when things got even cooler. (Hard to believe, I know, but brace yourself, it gets so so so much better.) Once again the keys came out and we started to make our way through a long series of narrow corridors and stairways sandwiched between the inside and outside walls of the cathedral.

There was a lot of this.

After many winding corridors and tiny doors and low hanging beams, we finally popped out on the roof. Of St. Paul's Cathedral. The freaking roof.

Thankfully, well-equipped with handrails.

Here we got to see the sort of work Tim does, because besides helping put up the Christmas Tree, one of his main things is making new stone balusters to fit into the balustrade that runs around the roof.

This photo shows how eroded the old stonework is compared to new.

The balusters are made from Portland Stone, and each one is carved by hand from a template taken from the original work. Then they're craned up to the roof and carried by hand (which takes two guys) to be fitted into place. Other than the electrically winched crane it's all impressively analog. 

And the views are not bad either, with the Walkie Talkie on the left and The Shard centre-right.

More interesting than the view in this photograph is the evidence of major erosion shown. Those wide horizontal stones sitting on top of the balusters were laid about 300 years ago, and the seams between filled with molten lead. 

Look how much stone has worn away compared to the height of the original lead seams. No wonder they need stone masons on staff.

After hanging out on the roof for a bit, we went back inside to more backstage-iness, this time directly above the nave of the Cathedral, where we could see the tops of the domes that make up the ceiling.

This is the upper side of the stone vaulting that forms the ceiling. Which we walked all over. I hasten to add that it is much more than just ONE layer thick. And those wooden pegs sticking out of the floor? Those are plugging holes in the ceiling used for dropping lifting points when needed. Tim blithely pulled one out so we could look down to the floor, one million feet below. Oh, and those wooden beams! This photo doesn't really show it, but viewed along their length you can see they're hand-hewn and twisted and look very much like the trees they were 300 years ago. So cool.

Other than the overall amazingness of the tour in general, one of the best things was being in that big stone building and learning about the stone itself. So many of London's great buildings are made of stone, but the stone itself never gets much attention. For instance, up above the nave, we looked at an unassuming corner of stonework along the wall.

Each of these stone blocks was probably cut by someone different. Tim pointed at a rough one that was likely done by an apprentice (second full course from the bottom), another that was sawn (fourth from the bottom), and another that was shaped with a stone axe (fifth). So much history and information hiding in plain site.

We also got to pop out into the famous Whispering gallery, closed to the public since 2019. They're currently getting ready to install safety fencing, and doing other renovation work on the gallery before it reopens. And of course one of the things being renovated is the stone floor.

Here you can see two new pristine white stone flags cut and shaped by Tim and showing their new, very intentional tooling marks, next to ones worn smooth, with their remaining blackened tooling marks just visible at the edge.

Our last stop might have been my favourite of the day - the mason's workshop back in the modern car-park-ish area where we entered. (I take that back. Of course my favourite was the roof, but I love a functioning workshop. Love, love, love.) 

The Mason's Workshop at St. Paul's was not big or grand. But it was well-kept and well-lit and appropriately dusty and just excellent. I mean look at this tool cabinet!

So many hammers and chisels.

These are the zinc templates they use for making bits of cathedral. Top of the pile is the baluster.

And here's a baluster under construction. 

In looking at this shape it seemed obvious to me that you'd start with a rectangular block and rough-saw the basic shape, then chisel out the detail. But of course that's not how they do it. Yes, they start with a big rectangular blank, but from there the whole thing is chiselled by hand. Every chip. By hand. Chip. Chip. Chip. Chip. Chip. The first one took Tim three weeks, though he's faster now. And he calculated that if you chisel for a whole eight hour work day with an average hammer, that's eight tons of weight wielded by your hammering arm. Apparently that can net you an impressive six pack on one side. A three-pack, shall we say?

We hung around in Tim's workshop for quite a while, and he showed us a bit of mason-ing, which looks just like you'd expect. Guy with a hammer and chisel chipping off tiny bits of stone over and over and over again. Impressive, repetitive, and really, really... old. You get the impression you could transport Tim back to the 17th century stone yard where they cut the original blocks for St. Paul's and he could pick up a hammer and chisel and fit right in with the rest of the gang, except for his modern steel-toed boots.

We tried to persuade Tim to let us buy him 100 pints at the nearest pub as thanks for the most amazing afternoon, but he had other plans. So Piran and I wandered off to slake our own parched throats and sit in disbelief. 

In the immortal words of John Denver: "Some days are diamonds, some days are stone". 

But the best days are both.

Amersham Fairground Organ Museum

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the boat lately, and am happy to report that engine is now running again! (Pause for wild applause.) Also, the new batteries are installed and the new alternator seems to be functioning, even if the digital battery monitor isn’t exactly reporting that fact correctly. And I finally fixed the cracked and crappy top of the sliding hatch that covers the main entryway, which has been cracked and crappy since the day I bought the boat (there's no sense rushing into these things). And if it ever warms up properly I may make a dent in the exterior paint touch-ups that I started but had to abandon until the temperature outside cooperates. I know that compared to the reported -38 degrees from Saskatchewan a few weeks ago, I’ve got nothing to complain about. But that doesn’t change the fact that the rust treatment I applied to the back deck on a Wednesday was still not completely cured by the following Sunday.

So yeah, I've been doing a lot on the boat. But it's also quite easy to get busy with that for days on end and then suddenly realise that it's really time to get out and interact with other actual humans instead of just engine parts. Luckily, I'm on a few mailing lists that drop a tantalising rotation of diversions into my inbox every week (Thank you IanVisits). And that's how I found the Amersham Fair Organ Museum.

Note the charming mock Tudor building in the background is NOT the Amersham Fair Organ Museum. It's also not a pub, which is what I was hoping.

Amersham is a leafy Metroland suburb at the nether reaches of the Metropolitan line, and is home to the Amersham Fair Organ Museum, a collection of mechanical fairground organs tucked into a small industrial building next to a removals company and a crossfit gym.  Run by volunteers, it falls squarely into the Small-But-Plucky category of museum also inhabited by the likes of the Pumphouse Museum and the Beatles Museum. Once each month, the good people of AFOM open the doors, turn on the tea urn, and crank up the machines, making it a perfectly bloggy destination for a grey Sunday.

This small-ish room is pretty much the whole thing, and it houses eight or nine different mechanical organs. So when one is playing, you know it.

Mechanical organs, as any Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Reader will easily deduce, are pipe organs that are played automatically by a combination of air pressure and complicated mechanisms instead of human hands and feet. They were popular on fairgrounds through the 1800s because their loud volume helped attract crowds and could be heard over the general din of people and fairground machinery. They remained a fixture until electrically amplified music started to take over in the 1920s. Luckily, many have survived thanks to dedicated collectors such as the good folks of the Amersham Fairground Organ Museum. (In fact, there are apparently SEVEN collections of fairground organs in the UK alone. Who knew?)

Limonaire Freres was a particularly well-known manufacturer of fairground organs, so much so that "limonaire" became the generic term in French for this sort of pneumatic-mechanical instrument.

At first, mechanical organs operated sort of like giant music boxes, with rotating barrels covered with pins used to direct to air from mechanical bellows to the various pipes. Known as "barrel organs", these devices were cumbersome because changing the tune meant replacing the entire pinned barrel completely - a costly proposition. The barrels were also large and heavy to store. Other systems used paper rolls like a player piano, but they were fragile and required careful handling. To alleviate the shortcomings of these two systems, the Gavioli company patented a system of heavy cardboard pages linked together in accordion style which operated like a computer punchcard or a Jacquard loom. The Amersham museum has a LOT of these books.

This was just one shelf of many, most of which were tucked behind the machines. Each machine needs its own books, because each has different instrumentation.

I was surprised to see that the organs didn't simply feature air pushed through traditional organ pipes, but also included percussion! The same air pressure that moves past reeds in the pipes to create different instrumentation and pitches is also used to operate tiny bellows that move drumsticks!

Here you can see the book pages being expelled from the machine and the little white bellows that inflate to play the snare drum on the right, including some pretty impressive drum rolls. (Also, my profound apologies for the vertical letterboxing that Youtube has done on this video. It was very much a portrait orientation sort of situation, which Youtube seems unable to deal with in a visually appropriate way.)

The same air pressure also operates cymbals, hi-hats, bass drums and other assorted percussion. And you may have noticed the little conductor man in front of the Limonaire organ in the photo above. Naturally, he waves his arms in time with the music.

As did the conductor of this fancy gang. The ones on the sides have little wands that hit the brass bells at the top of their staffs.

The complexity and decoration of these machines was fantastic and right up my alley. As was the the enormous woodstove that was cranking out heat on an unseasonably cold and grey Sunday afternoon. And, more importantly, the excellent selection of cakes and sandwiches on offer.

Victorian Sponge (tick), Lemon Drizzle cake (tick), Carrot Cake (tick), Cookies (tick)... excellent job Amersham Fairground Organ Museum!

As we know, a nice hot beverage and a bit of cake is a vital component to a successful bloggy day out, so I was kicking myself when I discovered that the AFOM did not have a card reader, and I did not have cash. This necessitated a long walk almost all the way back to the station to what appeared to be the only cash machine in Amersham. And then all the way back. Luckily it was a good sandwich (brie, bacon and red onion marmalade, for those keeping track at home) which I of course supplemented with a credible piece of lemon drizzle cake, and a really really good cup of tea, so all was forgiven.

As the afternoon progressed, each organ in the room got its air time. Of course I missed a few while on my quest for hard currency, but there were still plenty in the queue when I got back. And the closer I looked, the more curious I became about how the relatively few "lines" in the cardboard music books could control so many different elements. I'd hoped that there'd be some explanatory text on display, or perhaps a break in the action for a bit of technical Q&A, but that's not how they roll at AFOM. Instead I had to flag down a friendly volunteer to get an explanation.

Honestly, there are hundreds and hundreds of pipes, bells, whistles, drums, cymbals and miscellaneous waving arms. How is that all controlled by what looks like a maximum of about 20 lines?

Luckily, Paul The Volunteer was very friendly and managed to shout some information over the din of the nearby organ. Better still, HE LET ME BEHIND THE VELVET ROPE and opened up the back of an organ while it was playing to show me how hundreds of air lines are routed through the machine. 

So very cool. It seems a lot of different elements get combined and are controlled by a single "line" in the book. For instance, the conductor's arm, the high hat, and the bass drum might all be controlled from the same line in the book. Still, I'd have liked the chance to understand it more clearly. 

Paul did really know his stuff. As we watched the cards being fed into the machine he could call out what was coming, "Drum roll here. Here come the piccolos..." etc. And, pleasingly, the higher pitched elements were at the top of the page and the lower ones further down, with the percussion at the bottom, which is obviously how it should be. Plus, and I simply can't overstate this enough, HE LET ME BEHIND THE VELVET ROPE. So he definitely wins a GSWPL Award of Merit.

Also pleasing is the fact that many of these organs have been restored to life by a company just down the road in Chesham. Kevin Meayers Organs has been in business since 1984 and not only restores and repairs mechanical organs, but builds new ones too. It frankly did not occur to me that, in the age of Spotify, anyone would still be making new mechanical organs from scratch, but Kevin Meayers will happily take that on. They also manufacture blank cardboard books for perforation, and create arrangements of new music as well, perforating the books on site with fantastic machines like this.

This photo is from the Kevin Meayers website, and demonstrates that it's perfectly obvious that Kevin Meayers should team up with the AFOM people to offer tours on the same day so you could do a whole northwest London mechanical organ outing in one go.  

And to illustrate the wide range of musical genres Kevin Meayers can provide... how about a little Tammy Wynette?

The last organ in the round-the-room tour was a bit different. While all the others in the collection were a category I'm calling "Mostly Pipes Plus Other Bits (MPPOB)", this one was in a more modern style, and had a lot of real instruments on it. 

Accordion, drum kit, xylophone, saxophone, and those wacky coconut shell things in the top corner. Let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've heard an autonomous accordion accompanied by what I think was a disembodied slide whistle playing "The White Cliffs of Dover".

The best part is that all those instruments were not just for show - they were all really playing! The accordion opened and closed and you could see the keys depressing. This makes a lot of sense, because the accordion is a natively bellows-operated thing to begin with, but the moving keys... that was lovely. And there's the line of little mallets played the xylophone. Even the saxophone had tiny wire linkages working the keys. My favourite, though, was the quartet of coconut things. They had a lot of personality for a collection of pneumatically-actuated smackers and hollow wooden shells. This organ was a definite highlight, which I lovingly videoed for the good of the blog:

Go Go Gadget Coconuts!

By the time I'd had my fill of the ghost accordion, I felt like I'd fully embraced the entirety of the Amersham Fairground Organ Museum experience, lemon drizzle cake and all. On the way back to the station I made a quick stop at the half scale model of the Metropolitan One steam locomotive as a nod to the Metroland origins of Amersham. (Yeah, now you see that you really should have clicked on that Metroland link at the beginning. I put effort into those links you know!)

Nicely painted in the colours of the Metropolitan Line, of course.

And because it was going to be a long trip back to the boat, I did the only sensible thing and made a pitstop in Harrow-on-the-Hill between the tube and bus portions of the journey. It just made sense.

I have no regrets. (Actually, that's not true. I regret that the pub was out of sausage rolls. Boo.)

In other GSWPL-related news... positively SEISMIC changes are afoot here, but I'm saving that news for another blog. Meanwhile, enjoy posts when they appear, which I know is less and less frequently, but as I like to remind everyone, I've now been blogging somewhere-or-other for more than fourteen years. So really, be thankful I'm still here at all, that's all I'm gonna say.

On the random excellence of London

Sometimes you make a plan, and sometimes that plan falls by the wayside. This was the case on a recent Monday morning just before Christmas. I'd been in Southend-on-Sea for a very jolly Christmas Party the night before, and then for a group breakfast by the seaside the morning after (Salmon Bubble Stack, since you asked). I also had plans in the West End that evening, and since Southend-on-Sea is in the far southeast, and the mooring for the boat is in the far northwest, it wasn't really practical for me to get all the way home to the boat and then all the way back to the West End in time for my rendez-vous. Despite having not even started packing for my Tuesday flight home to Canada for Christmas, and even though there was a lot to be done on the boat otherwise (more on which later, if I can bear to recount the sad tale) I decided that sometimes you just need to let fate intervene. So on the train back towards central London I made a plan to visit one or more small London museums, most probably the Freemason's Hall, as a pleasant diversion to fill the time before my evening engagement.

The train from Southend-on-Sea terminates at Fenchurch Street Station, one of London's smaller rail termini. From there it's a short walk to an Underground station for the journey to Holborn, which would have been maximally efficient, but that's not the kind of mood I was in. Instead I thought I'd walk, since though it was cloudy and threatening, the weather was much warmer than it had been for ages and there was no urgency to my mission whatsoever. Moreover, I decided once again to put away Google Maps and find my own way. So began a meandering journey that should have taken 45 minutes, and ended up clocking in at about three hours and six kilometres. Because, as any Astute Go Stay Work Play Live Reader will understand, if you've got the time to stop and look when you're walking through London, you can't help but see some really cool stuff.

I figured it would be easiest to stay oriented if I was closer to the river, so I turned that way down a small side street near Fenchurch Street and was quickly distracted by the entrance to a nearby church - St.Olave's. And this perfectly illustrates my point about the density of cool stuff in London. Just by chance, less than a hundred metres from my starting point, I'd found one of the only medieval-era churches in the City of London to survive the Great Fire of 1666, which is also the final resting place of the famous diarist, Samuel Pepys.

St. Olave's. It still sometimes surprises me that you can wander in and out of most churches in this country. I always hesitate, but I'm rarely disappointed when I take the plunge.

This version of St. Olave's (named for the Norwegian saint) was built around 1450, though there was a house of worship on the site from about 1050. (So that's less than a thousand years. Pfft.) The churchyard is quite nice too. Small but pleasant, with a mosaic labyrinth and a stone entryway dubbed the Ghastly Grim Gate (by Charles Dickens, of course) because of the tympanum of the gate features carved skulls. That gateway leads onto the melodiously-named Seething Lane.

From Seething Lane I turned west and south again before walking down St. Mary at Hill street. This time I didn't bother visiting the eponymous church, though I did linger outside Waterman's Hall, the home of The Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames, a livery company. From there, a slight deviation to the northwest brought me to The Monument. (Which really deserves its own blog, so I'll just mention that I thought it fitting that a fire truck went past as I was reading one of the inscriptions on the base of the column.) Notably, one of the designers of The Monument was Sir Christopher Wren, who has, of course, been mentioned in the blog several times before and who will feature again very shortly. But first, I headed towards an often-overlooked landmark near Cannon Street Station.

The London Stone 

It's believed this unassuming lump of oolitic limestone has sat at or near this spot (barring a few relocations for safekeeping) since (they think) the Roman era (maybe). And you can take my multiple parentheses as an indication of how little is definitively known about the stone. Most of its history is myth and conjecture, though it does definitely appear on the Copperplate Map of London from the 1550s. This fancy Portland stone enclosure is very new - completed in 2018. I fondly remember its former, much less grand home behind an unassuming cast iron grill at street level, which made it look more like a storm drain than the resting place of a (possibly) ancient and (sort of) mystical (-ish) artefact. 

By this point it was becoming clear that the goal of visiting Freemason's Hall was fading fast and my afternoon was going to be spent in an aimless but diverting and fruitful wander through London, an idea that I wholly embraced en route to my next diversion, a dome that I spotted over the rooftops a few streets away and seemed worth a look.

St. Stephen Walbrook. It was really, really worth a look.

The plaque outside indicated that St. Stephen's was another effort of Sir Christopher Wren, but even if I hadn't been told that I'd like to think I would have recognised this right away as a Wren church. Characterised by rounded arches and white walls, Wren's churches are a marked departure from the darker gothic style you can see at St Olave's. Apparently St. Stephen's was Wren's parish church, so he took particular care with it, crowning it with what some consider his finest dome. In all, Wren was commissioned to rebuild 51 churches after the Great Fire, of which 13 survive in their original form, St. Stephen's among them.

And because it's London and the history is laid on with a trowel, inside the church there was also this:

St. Stephen's Walbrook is where the Samaritans was founded, in 1953. The Samaritans are a charitable organisation dedicated to providing support to anyone in emotional distress, and are best known for their telephone hotlines. They respond to millions of calls each year, and are largely staffed by volunteers.

I lingered for a while at St. Stephen's, before wending my way past the Mansion House and the Bank of England, stopping to read this plaque set in the pavement.

"The Great Conduit lies beneath this spot. Built by the City of London in 1245 to provide public water supplied by pipe from Tyburn Springs. Removed after the Great Fire of 1666 and found during the construction of One Poultry in 1994" *heart*

And then, of course, there was another church. Another Wren Church. 

The famous St. Mary le Bow

St Mary le Bow is the home of the famous Bow Bells. I've said it before but just for clarity (and word count), the Bow Bells are significant because a true Cockney must be born within the sound of their peal. Wikipedia helpfully notes that in 1850 the sound of the Bow Bells could likely be heard as far as Hackney Marshes, Limehouse and possibly even south of the Thames in Southwark. Tragically, urban noise pollution and the lack of any maternity hospitals in the vicinity make the birth of any genuine 21st century cockneys unlikely (though not impossible). 

See what I mean about the Wren Churches? Round arches, white-washed walls, restrained (ish) baroque finishing

The Bow Bells also feature in the famed nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" a Who's Who of London churches:

Oranges and lemons. Say the bells of St. Clement's.

You owe me five farthings. Say the bells of St. Martin's.

When will you pay me? Say the bells at Old Bailey.

When I grow rich. Say the bells at Shoreditch.

When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney.

I do not know. Says the great bell at Bow.

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,

And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead.

Next up were a few more livery halls - the Saddler's Hall and the site of the former Broderers Hall ("formed to promote and protect the fine art of embroidery"). And of course I wouldn't make it out of the City without another Wren church, this one the oddly named St Vedast-Alias-Foster, which sounds more like a What Three Words location than a place of worship. (For the record, one of the What Three Words locations covered by St Vedast is Sleepy.Covers.Fantastic.)

Inside St. Vedast. Again... soooooo Wren.

St Vedast-Alias-Foster follows the formula of so many City churches: founded in the middle ages, damaged or destroyed in the Great Fire, rebuilt by Wren, bombed during the Blitz, and restored once again in the 1950s. Interestingly, this church was Wren's most economical effort, built up from the medieval foundations for a mere £2,958, as compared to a whopping £15,421 for St. Mary le Bow. (Only St. Paul's Cathedral was more expensive.)

St. Paul's was just down the street, but having been there before I skipped that most obvious of Wrens, past a gigantic construction site of what looks like it's going to be an awful lumpish office development just behind the cathedral. The last Wren site of the day was the former Christ Church Greyfriars which follows the above formulas up to the point of its substantial destruction in the Blitz. The outer walls and tower survived, and today surround a public garden. The nearby vestry building is now home to a dentist's office. Of course.

A brief diversion down Warwick Lane lead to the Cutler's Hall (another livery company) that boasts a really lovely terracotta frieze by Benjamin Creswick, depicting the different steps in the process of knife-making: forging, grinding, hafting, and finishing.

Cutler's Hall survived the Blitz, which destroyed the Royal College of Physicians next door (commemorated by the rectangular blue plaque just to the left of the main entrance)

Thank you to Look Up London for this close up photo. 

By this point I'd been dragging myself and my not-insubstantial overnight luggage around the City for a couple hours. A stroll past the Old Bailey was next, but we've heard about that already. Instead, I was still gamely diving down side streets and following my nose wherever it looked like something interesting might be found.

Which is how I found this excellent thing. It's a very clever bit of shadowplay that tells office workers for that building where they can securely store their bikes. So it wasn't all Wren and livery companies.

Nearing the home stretch, and now slightly damp with intermittent drizzle, I headed along Fleet Street, famously the home of the printing trade and, by extension, to newspapers and journalism. Printing started in the area around 1500, and the first newspaper was published there in 1702. Dickens Pickwick Papers is partially set on Fleet Street and it's also the home of the equally fictitious demon barber. This was familiar territory, since Fleet Street is a major thoroughfare. However, I'd never noticed one laneway off a side street: Magpie Alley

The alley features a long mural of custom tilework detailing the history of the print and journalism trade in the area.

By now it was well past time for cake and a hot beverage, and I was gratified that even though I was still navigating by feel, it wasn't long before I found my way to High Holborn Street, and a nice cup of tea. I did also eventually end up going past my originally intended destination - Freemason's Hall - but we'll have to save that for a whole other blog because by that time I was in very familiar territory and on my way to something even better than a nice cup of tea... a friendly few pints in a nice pub!

That was just one relatively short walk on a quiet Monday afternoon, with no overarching theme or purpose, that still managed to take in what I think is an astonishing number of unique or beautiful or quirky sites. Because... well, because it's London. And more than twelve years after I arrived, and nine years after I wrote this, I still love it.

Scouse and scouse and scousers

Merry Christmas! I got you a blog.

When last we left our doughty blogger, she was enjoying the delights of Liverpool. And while the Beatles may be inescapable in that northern city, they aren't the only game in town. So let's rewind to the start of the visit, but skip all that Beatles stuff you've already heard about.

One of my first stops in town was trip around the grounds of St. Luke's Bombed Out Church. (I promise that's really what they call it.) Set at a prominent intersection, the church was completed in 1832 and then struck by a German bomb in May of 1941. The interior of the church was completely destroyed by the ensuing fire, but the outer walls remained standing. Derelict for many years, the now-outdoor site has been redeveloped into a community space for live performance, markets and other community events, one of which was a vinyl record sale that afforded me a chance to wander the site on Saturday morning.

I particularly liked this statue commemorating the famous Christmas Truce of WW1. The poppies around the base were a temporary addition for Remembrance Day

Very clever re-purposing of  plastic water bottles!

The inside of the church

Much of Saturday and Sunday was taking up Beatling, but I did have a nice wander around the nearby Georgian Quarter of the city after my disappointing breakfast (about which you have already heard me rant, so I will spare you). The morning was clear and chilly and I had some time to kill and a lot of sub-standard french toast to burn off, so it seemed a perfect time to check out the neighbourhood.

The Georgian Quarter is a small residential area of central Liverpool that boasts a lovely collection of Georgian streets so impressive that it's frequently used as a filming location. (You may have seen the Georgian Quarter in "Peaky Blinders".) It was very pleasant for a stroll and found myself humming and tripping along the streets in a very contented mood.

A typical street in the Georgian Quarter. You can just picture an episode of "Bridgerton" or "Downton Abbey", can't you?

After a short wander, I eventually found my way to Liverpool Cathedral. The Georgian Quarter is actually the site of two cathedrals, which could hardly be more different. The more modern of the two - the Roman Catholic Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral - is popularly known as Paddy's Wigwam, for reasons that will be obvious to those who follow this link. I did not elect to visit that spot. However, the Anglican cathedral was definitely worth a visit, being the largest cathedral in Britain, and the 8th largest church in the world. (Other size-related facts of note: Liverpool Cathedral is the longest in the world, and the 5th largest by volume. So by whatever metric you use, the place is a behemoth.)

Liverpool Cathedral, moodily backlit.

The cathedral is also surrounded by a very nice cemetery garden which I walked through. The cemetery and gardens lie in a sunken area around the cathedral site that makes the building itself even more imposing. Their sunken-ness is because the site is a former 18th century stone quarry from which the stone for many of Liverpools public buildings was cut. It became Liverpool's main cemetery between 1825 and 1936.

It's a bit overgrown and Highgate-y now.

I also took some un-blog-worthy photos of a chalybeate spring coming out of one of the high cut banks surrounding the gardens. What is a chalybeate spring, you say? It's a natural mineral spring containing iron salts of course! Rather you should ask how one PRONOUNCES chalybeate, because I can virtually guarantee it's not what you expect. Certainly not CHAL-ee-beet, as you might think. Ho ho, of course not! Not in a country where Cholmondeley is pronounced CHUM-lee. How do we pronounce chalybeate?  Kuh-LEE-bee-utt. Yup. I know. Don't bother questioning. Let's just move on, while slowly shaking our heads.

Once I finally made it inside, Liverpool Cathedral is equally massive. 

The reddish sandstone and the light coloured mortar give the whole place an unusual stripey appearance, like the columns are wearing jolly socks. And as you can see it's just HUGE. And despite it's quite traditional appearance, it's a relatively modern building. started in 1904 and not completed until 1978 (!). The arches are apparently the largest Gothic arches ever built, and the pipe organ is the largest in the UK (with a staggering 10,268 pipes. How is that even possible?). More exciting still, it also has the world’s highest and heaviest ringing peal of bells, housed in the monumental central tower. Even better, you can buy a ticket to ascend the tower and view Liverpool from above. Even EVEN better, there are lifts, for the comfort of both bell-ringers and tourists.

When you finally emerge from the last of the lifts for the climb to the roof, you get a fantastic view of the bell support structure, which features a great tenor bell weighing 4.1 tonnes! (3rd heaviest in the UK, after Great Paul and the Olympic bell, neither of which are currently rung.)

Naturally, the views from the roof of the tower are excellent, and I hit it at the perfect moment, when the day's rain had cleared off and the light was golden. Here's that same bit of the Georgian Quarter we saw moments ago, looking particularly fetching.

Other than the cathedral, I visited a lesser-known and more down-at-heel Liverpool site, the (formerly) grand Adelphi Hotel. Situated very near the main railway hub, Lime Street Station, the present Adelphi is the third hotel to occupy the site and is a Grade II listed building completed in 1914. It's very much in the grand tradition of railway hotels, which also extended to Canada, as Asute Go Stay Work Play Live readers will of course recall. (The second iteration, which opened in 1876, was for a time regarded as the most luxurious hotel in the UK outside of London, boasting, along with standard-issue sumptuous dining rooms and lavish guest suites, a set of heated tanks in the basement for keeping live turtles to be used in the making of fresh turtle soup. That's proper decadence.) (Also a bit creepy.)

A colleague recommended I check out the hotel, with the caution that I must not, under any circumstances, consider patronising the Adelphi as an actual overnight guest. The public rooms were worth a visit, but the quality of the guest rooms, and the service in general, has fallen to a precipitous degree since the days of fresh turtle soup. 

He wasn't kidding about the public spaces though! Here's the Central Court, with skylights and pink marble pilasters. 

Closer inspection showed just how poorly maintained the place is. The furniture was an odd and bedraggled collection, and the skylights appear to have last been cleaned when Margaret Thatcher was in office. Given that rooms for the night go for as little as £38, I can't imagine they're pushing the boat out there either. Indeed, that seems to be borne out by this investigative video. 

I foolishly tried to get a cup of tea, and maybe a bit of cake, based on the advertised flyer stating that afternoon tea was available, but despite wandering through several public rooms I could find no evidence of service, at which point it became clear that the correct move was a tactical retreat to the pub. Of course. Following that diversion (to the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, about which you've already read), I finally made my way back to the scene of the previous night's disappointment to try, once again, to sample the famed local delicacy, scouse.

Liverpool is famous for its scouse, so much so that the residents are affectionately and proudly known as Scousers and the Liverpool accent is also called scouse. (And happily, scouse is pronounced exactly as you'd expect: sKOWs.) And here I'm required by UK law to mention that scouse is a contraction of 'lobscouse', which, despite the fact that it's a traditional stew eaten by sailors in northern Europe, has absolutely nothing to do with lobsters.

I realise now that I actually had very little idea what scouse was, so I'll admit to being slightly disappointed to discover it's nothing more than a bowl of beef (or sometime lamb) stew. 

My eventual bowl of scouse, served with the traditional accompaniments of bread and butter and pickled red cabbage. I found this particular pickled cabbage quite harsh, but I can appreciate the concept. You can also get a vegetarian version that's always called Blind Scouse, which I find a charming appellation.

What was delightful was that this bowl of traditional scouse - beef, onion, carrot and potato - tasted exactly like the beef stew my mom used to make. I suppose when you combine those particular ingredients in a big pot and add stock and time the result is always going to end up tasting the same, wherever you make it and whatever you call it. So while it wasn't a new and exciting food, it was still a very pleasant and satisfyingly homey dinner for a cold night, and a fitting end to my time as a tourist in Liverpool.

And now I'm tucked up on the boat in the middle of a cold snap. There's ice on the canal basin and the coal stove is belting out heat. I've also recently invested in an electric blanket, which is a REVELATION. Don't get me wrong - I'm still a big fan of the classic hot water bottle, and use that frequently to combat icy toes. But having the ability to pre-heat the bed to toasty perfection before getting in at night is utterly delicious and still makes me squeal out loud with delight when I snuggle in. These days, when the temperature has been solidly below freezing for days on end, I even leave the blanket on all night at the lowest setting, which is very cozy indeed. It's not done wonders for my electricity consumption, the price of which has more than doubled recently (thank you, cost-of-living crisis) but it's cheaper than a space heater and much more efficient. It's also still disspiritingly cold when I get home after a long day away - usually in the 3-9 degrees range - but such is the price we boat people pay. (Along with the price of the new starter motor and the impending new alternator, new battery disconnect switches, new leisure batteries (x5!) and whatever else comes along.) Not for the faint of heart, that's all I'm saying.