"...Would blow you through and through."
Right, so January I resolved to visit at least 4 places in London I have never been before. Here are my four:
Tower Bridge Exhibition
Early this month a friend and I visited the glass walkway and engine rooms at Tower Bridge.
I get in for free as a perk of my job, so that was one of the reasons we decided on that one! It was pretty cool actually, really fun to stand on the glass and pretend to crush the cars and pedestrians below
(though it would be better if some of them fell down to make it more realistic) and I quite liked seeing the engines. The main downside was the amount of tourists... Do you really need 3 pictures of you lying on the glass floor? Really? Do you really think the glass will break if I jump on it? MORE FOOL YOU.
I'm not sure it would have been worth the £9 fee most visitors spend, but I'm pleased I went.
Highgate Cemetery
The middle of this month I took a tour of the West Cemetery at Highgate.
We arrived and signed up to the next tour and luckily we were the only people on it! Private tour?
Yes please! A lovely, very knowledgeable volunteer named Doreen showed us round, including a grave not always shown on the regular tour - the Rossetti's. This is also the resting place of Elizabeth Siddal, muse and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Who had her exhumed a few years after her burial in order to retrieve an unpublished book of poems to sell when he fell on hard times! So romantic...
I particularly enjoyed the grave of
Tom Sayers, a bare-knuckle fighter who lasted more than forty rounds in a fight against American John Heenan, despite breaking his arm early on and fighting the rest one-handed. When he died a few years later, his chief mourner was his mastiff, Lion, a stone version of whom guards his grave.
I wish I could list all of Doreen's facts and stories, but I will just give shout-outs to the tombs of
George Wombwell,
Julius Beer, and
Radclyffe Hall. Look 'em up.
Will definitely be going back in the Summer. Double thumbs up.
Dennis Severs' House
On the 19th CB and I had a mooch around Dennis Severs' House in Folgate Street.
It's a house/museum/still-life-drama that you walk round in silence. Each room is a different historical period, and you follow the story of the fictional Jervis family as you walk through the house and walk through time.
The rooms are arranged as if the family has just walked out as you've walked in, with half drunk cups of tea, broken cups, unmade beds and spilt sugar etc. Very odd, very unusual and
really cool! A lot of objects you'd be used to seeing in a museum, but having them arranged as though they were still in use really changes your perception of them. It's like a living museum.
I particularly like the kitchen, with cheeky sugar mice and gingerbread men peeping out from the shelves and cookery books, and I liked the noise effects because they really helped cement you in the time period of the room. I also enjoyed checking to see if the chamber pots had been used or not!
Very odd, but well worth a visit.
Sky Garden
I work in the City, so a group of us decided to visit the Sky Garden in the Walkie Talkie. I think CoL gave it planning permission so really we were doing our civic duty in inspecting it. Yes we were.
I am sad to say it was
really really disappointing!
I know everything's newly planted, but you can't really call it a garden. The planted bits are too steep and you can't walk on them. The view is gorgeous and all the curved glass is absolutely beautiful and all that jazz, but the place feels very corporate and not garden-like at all. We looked around, took some pictures....and left. There is a cafe, but we figured the food would be pretty pricey, and there is a terrace but it was bloody closed!
(Not cool, Sky Garden.)
Would make a bangin' club though. Just saying.
*Quote from William Shakespeare
