One week in London — Letters from the Road

It's a long trip from Tirana to New Orleans, so I decided to stop somewhere on the way. London seemed like a good idea. Why only one week? Because it's all I can afford, even in less than desirable conditions. Once I stayed in a hotel in Paris where I had to relocate a chair to the top of the bed so I had space to open the bathroom door. I used to say that was the smallest hotel room in the world. I was wrong. This hotel room in London is smaller. It doesn't even have space for a chair. And a chair could be useful there, especially after climbing the stairs to the fourth floor of this Victorian building. Well, as I said, it was all I could afford (barely). And I was determined to make the most of my stay in the British capital, and cram as many museums as I could in those few days. Only one week but a lot of activity. Get a drink and sit down, it's going to be a long newsletter. But stay with me and I promise you some Harry Potter at the end.

Day one

Despite the morning drizzle, I started my day with a walk in Kensington Gardens. I saw the Italian Gardens, the Peter Pan statue, the Arch sculpture by Henry Moore, and the Albert Memorial. I even found the bench where I read The Lord of the Rings decades ago when I lived here.

A good place to read The Lord of the Rings

Then I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the main attraction for the day. It's hard to describe, because it seems to have everything, but I would call it a museum of decorative arts. There are thousands of objects, including furniture, ceramics, glass, metalworks, jewelry, textiles, and also sculptures, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and books. The area called the Cast Courts is one of the most impressive, even knowing they are all copies. They have, among many other things, a full-size replica of Michelangelo's David (I saw the original recently at the Galleria dell'Accademia in Firenze) and a full-size replica of Trajan's Column (I saw the original many years ago in Rome, and another replica more recently at the National Museum of Romanian History in Bucharest). My favorite pieces in the museum were a few paintings by J.M.W. Turner and a few photos by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Next I went to the Natural History Museum, which is just across the street. The star here is the building itself, both externally (with a façade covered in sculpted terracotta tiles) and internally (with a main hall that resembles a cathedral, stained glass windows on both sides, and an enormous skeleton of a whale hanging from the ceiling).

I finished the day with another long walk that took me to Kensington Palace (birthplace of Queen Victoria) and to Prince's Square (where I lived decades ago, now refurbished and gentrified and certainly beyond my purchasing power).

Day two

Time to get into the tube (that's what they call the metro here) and go to Trafalgar Square. That's the site of the famous Nelson's Column, a monument over 50 meter tall celebrating Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who led England to victory against France and Spain at the Battle of Trafalgar (hence the name of the square), preventing their combined fleet to attempt taking control of the English Channel as a first step for Napoleon to invade the United Kingdom.

The main attraction in Trafalgar Square is the National Gallery, an impressive art museum full of memories for me. The collection is spectacular. They have many iconic landscapes by Claude Lorrain (including The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba) and by J.M.W. Turner (including The Fighting Temeraire). Boticelli and Ucello. El Greco and Velázquez. Ingres and Delacroix. They have several works by Raphael and by Titian, and a room full of Rembrandts. And Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Seurat. Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck. Room after room of amazing art.

Since I was in the area, I also visited the National Portrait Gallery, which houses many very well known paintings and photographs of historical figures, from Henry VIII and William Shakespeare to James Joyce and Elizabeth II. I was particularly glad to see portraits of fellow travelers like Lord Byron and Richard Francis Burton, always an inspiration.

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, by Claude Lorrain

Day three

Rain. It's London, of course there would be rain. I spent most of the day inside the British Museum. A long trip into history and into my own memories. My old tricks still work. I went to the back entrance at opening time, to get a shorter line, and then moved directly to the third floor, to find the Egyptian rooms almost empty and ready for me to admire the mummies and sarcophagi in tranquility. One hour later you could barely move in that area, now filled with hordes of tourists. I worked my way down from the third floor and explored as much as I could. Yes, I saw the Rosetta Stone (the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs), the Elgin Marbles (it still hurts me that they were stripped off the Parthenon and brought here), and the Hoa Hakananai'a (a large Maori statue from Easter Island), but I have my own favorite pieces. The Lewis Chessmen (Scotland, 12th century), with their little startled faces, always make me smile. The bronze head of Augustus (Egypt, 25 BCE) has a pair of sad eyes that could hypnotize you. And the small bronze Pazuzu head (Iraq, 900 BCE), which I sketched decades ago in my visits to the British Museum.

Then I went to Charles Dickens's house, where he wrote The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. He wasn't home, but I got to see his working place, his bedroom, his dining room, and the rest of his spacious lodgings.

I also visited the John Soane's Museum. He was a rich architect and collector, and his house is crammed with art works. What attracted me there was the fact that he was a friend of J.M.W. Turner, and I was expecting to see some of his paintings in the collection. Apparently Soane only owned three of them, and just one is on display. However, he had three large Canalettos that were more than enough to justify stopping by.

Then, at night, I went to the Trafalgar Theater to watch The 39 Steps. Very funny version of the Buchan's book and Hitchcock's movie, with just four actors interpreting dozens of characters.

Day four

I needed a calmer day after all the walking done so far, so I only went to four museums.

The first stop was the Sherlock Holmes Museum, which recreates the fictional house on 221B Baker Street where the detective lived and worked. They did a good job decorating the rooms with authentic objects from the last decades of the 19th century, inspired both on the books and the movies.

Then I visited the Wallace Collection. It's a large 18th century mansion, filled with an impressive collection of European and Oriental weapons and armor, plus paintings, watercolors, drawings, and ostentatious decoration. There was a predilection for the Rococo style, which doesn't appeal to me, but there is also plenty of good art to see, including five Rembrandts, four Turners, and eight Canalettos.

I also went to the Cartoon Museum (one exhibit about the history of English cartoons and one about superheroes and English artists) and to the Photographers Gallery (a four storey building dedicated to photography, with several exhibitions).

Day five

Cloudy day, which was the best weather I got so far. There was a little sun early in the morning, and then it disappeared. I took the tube all the way to the Tower Bridge, and walked alongside the Thames to the south. It's a very photogenic river, with views to attractive bridges and some famous landmarks like St. Paul's Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.

My first stop was the Tate Modern, a museum housing modern and contemporary art. The modern part was very interesting, including Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Dalí, Ernst, Magritte, de Chirico, Lichtenstein, and many other classics. The contemporary part was boring and stale.

After a very long walk, I reached the Tate Britain, the original Tate Gallery (now they have four, the two in London plus one in Liverpool and one in St. Ives). So many great things to see. For me, of course, the main course was their collection of paintings by J.M.W. Turner, the largest in the world. There are about one hundred works on display (they own 300 oil paintings and 36,000 drawings and watercolors), which kept me there for a long time. I also admired works by Blake, Canaletto, Waterhouse, Millais, Rossetti, Bacon, Moore, Hockney, and many others. A very good museum.

Norham Castle, Sunrise, by J.M.W. Turner

Day six

Went on a little tour outside the city. First I visited Oxford, 90 km north-west of London. Just walked around the city looking at those buildings that are so full of history but still in use by the University of Oxford, the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation (the first one is the Università di Bologna). So many memories of movies and books set in Oxford, like the His Dark Materials trilogy, the Inspector Morse novels, The Oxford Murders, and of course the Harry Potter series, which doesn't happen in Oxford but has a Hogwarts School that would fit perfectly here (actually, a few scenes were filmed here).

Then I went to Stonehenge, uber famous prehistoric megalithic structure in Amesbury. If you can pretend that all those selfie-obsessed tourists are not there, the place is like a trip to the past, with those enormous stones sitting in the middle of an empty field for unknown reasons. I like to imagine that the people who built Stonehenge did it just because the stones looked nice there.

On the way back to London, I stopped at Windsor for afternoon tea. It's a quaint little town (population: 32,608), 35 km west of London, that is the site of Windsor Castle, one of the many residences of the royal family. It seemed the perfect place to have afternoon tea, since it was a habit born in the royal court. Anna Maria Russell, Duchess of Bedford and a court lady for Queen Victoria, annoyed with the long gap between her early lunch and her late dinner, started having some tea and cake late in the afternoon. This ritual was adopted by other royal courtiers and also by the queen, and soon became a national tradition. My afternoon tea in Windsor consisted of Earl Gray tea, egg sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches (no bread crust), scone and strawberry jam.

Last day

To close my English mini-tour, I went to Watford, 24 km northwest of London, home of the Leavesden Studios, now named Warner Bros. Studio Tour London - The Making of Harry Potter. It's not a theme park, it's an exhibition of sets, costumes, and props used in the Harry Potter movies. The sets are impressive for the size and for the level of detail. There's the great hall of Hogwarts, the entrance hall of Gringotts Bank, Diagon Alley, and a few others. I think the two things I liked the most were the collection of prosthetics for the goblins working at Gringotts and the large model of Hogwarts castle (15 meters in diameter) used for exterior shots.

And the food?

For this visit to London, I decided to explore the wonders of pub food. I went to places with names like The Pride of Paddington, The Dickens Tavern, Shakespeare's Head, The Clarence, The Champion, The Victoria, and The Ship & Shovell, and found food that was good and interesting. The famous fish and chips, found in any pub, is a battered haddock fillet, chips, peas, and tartare sauce. The secret is using ale in the batter. The steak and ale pie is steak slowly cooked in ale and encased in shortcrust pastry. Bangers and mash is the pairing of sausages and mashed potatoes (sometimes they glaze the sausages with honey and mustard, which is delicious). Scotch egg is a hard-boiled egg surrounded by sausage meat and coated in breadcrumbs. I ate all that accompanied by shandy (half lemonade and half beer), which is the only way I drink beer, the traditional pub beverage.

What's next?

I'm already in New Orleans, where I will stay until the end of October. But that's a story for another time.

Laissez les bons temps rouler! (That's a popular saying here, a word-for-word Louisiana French translation of "let the good times roll".)