Before and After Death - The Tower and The Cathedral

For my first day in London, I decided to do the two things I wanted to see the most - The Tower of London (never been) and St. Paul's Cathedral (have been but don't remember.)

Successfully commuting in from Cambridge to King's Cross and then taking the Tube (once an urbanite, always an urbanite), I arrived at the Tower of London on a brightly sunny and gorgeous day, contrasting to the morbid history of the site I was on. I arrived just in time to catch a tour by a Yeoman Warder, aka Beefeater. Of the many things told but what I found most fascinating is the change in tower architecture for defensive towers. Before the Crusades, towers were square. After the Crusades, they were round. 

The Tower also has the only surviving medieval palace in Britain, dating back to the 1200s, which stands in the wall above Traitor's Gate. Prisoners were brought o the Tower through the Gate, two of which were quite famous and queens - Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. 

Speaking of Anne Boleyn, I stood where she, and many others, lost their heads, which was quite powerful. Moving on to see where she spent her time before her death, I made my way through the White Tower. It currently houses the Royal Armory, and does not show many signs to the fact that the White Tower used to be the prison and execution site. Other "guests" of the White Tower were Sir Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey, and most famously, Princes Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, also known as the Princes in the Tower, who disappeared and were said to have been either killed by their Uncle Richard or were spirited away to Ireland...Digression...There were two small skeletons found behind a staircase in the White Tower during Charles II's reign. It is thought that these may be the remains of the Princes, which are now interred at Westminster Abbey.  Now that Richard III's remains were discovered and confirmed last year in Leicester, these skeletons will be tested for DNA and compared to Richard III's for confirmation if the tower skeletons are related to Richard, thus proving them to be his nephews. A 540ish mystery may come to an end.

What was quite striking was the vastness of the complex and various architectural styles represented, from Saxon to Norman all the way up to Georgian, as seen in the Hospital buildings and houses. (Evidently, according to my Beefeater tour guide, there are still people who live with their families at the Tower.)

Taking the opportunity to walk, I found my way from the Tower west to St. Paul's Cathedral. Not able to take pictures of the interior, I am not able to describe the awesomeness of the gilded and colorful altars or ceilings. The crypt holds the remains of many famous people. I accidentally walked on Joshua Reynolds and JMW Turner and saw the monuments to Robert Hooke, William Blake, Alexander Fleming, and Lord Nelson. The coffin that Nelson is buried in was originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, but when he fell of favor with Henry VIII, he did not receive such a stately burial. The coffin was put into storage for about two hundred years until it was used for Nelson when he died at the Battle of Trafalgar. 

Taking advantage of the perfect weather, I climbed to the Golden Gallery on the top of Wren's great Dome - 550+ steps. And it was worth it for the panoramic views of the London, and the melding of historic architecture and newly modern developments like the Shard.

Photos from the day can be found here. 

Rediscovering England - The Itinerary

The more I researched and read and planned for my upcoming trip, the more excited I am!

Countdown until departure = 6 Days!

After reading through two of my favorite traveling planning books (Frommer's England and the Best of Wales and DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Britain), I've come up with an overwhelming list of things to do, places to go, sites to see.

And my list is....

East Anglia
Cambridge
Ely
Saffron Walden
Norwich
Colchester

East Midland
Lincoln
Chatsworth House
Burghley House

London
Tower of London
Westminster Abbey
St. Paul's Cathedral (and yes, I'm going to the top of Wren's Dome!)
National Gallery
National Portrait Gallery
Victoria and Albert Museum
Royal London Hospital Museum
Hampton Court (if time allows)

I'll have a home base in Cambridge, which is near and dear to a few of my nearest and dearest, so I'm glad to finally experience the magic of this old town. It will also make traveling easier to have one place to stay and to "fake live" in England for two weeks. It'll be interesting to experience what it is like to live in not only another city but also another country for a brief period of time.

More to come...

St. Paul’s Cathedral: A Search for Inspiration

For there, above my head, rising with glorious disregard from a low jumble of roofs and smoking chimneys, was the dome I had seen from Hampstead, only now it soared before me, its vaulting magnificence held by a vast coronet of pillars. The columned lantern at its summit reached upwards into the smoke-bruised sky…There was nothing of supplication in its appeal to Heaven, nothing of the humility before God so beloved of the Bible…It rose from the mud as a magnificent testament to the boundless ambitions of men, realized in all their inexorable glory.

This passage from the Nature of Monsters, by Clare Clark, is a description by Eliza, the protagonist, of her first viewing of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. In 1718, Eliza arrives in London as the maid to an apothecary. The position had been arranged for her by her mother and the family of the father of her unborn child, a wealthy merchant’s son, to smooth over the scandal of their attachment. Eliza finds herself in the clamor and chaos of eighteenth-century London struggling to free herself and to survive, with a view of the dome of St. Paul’s as a source of salvation.

After the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed most of Central London, Christopher Wren (1632-1723) dominated the rebuilding of the city, and English architecture, for the rest of the century. His major and most famous project was rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the city.

Eight years after the Great Fire, the ruins of St. Paul’s original structure had not been replaced or restored. Attempts to salvage the burned-out medieval church failed. Wren began demolishing the old building to make room for the new. The first stones were laid in the summer of 1675 and the last 35 years later.

For a faith with a profound distrust of Catholicism, Wren drew upon monumental Catholic examples in his design for St. Paul’s as the cathedral of the Diocese of London. As similar to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, St. Paul’s has a long nave, short transepts with semicircular ends, and a domed crossing. Commanding the city’s skyline, the dome for St. Paul’s has an interior masonry vault with an exterior sheathing of lead-covered wood, similar to the dome of the Florence Cathedral, and crowned by a lantern. Paired Corinthian columns line the main west front. The tremendous size of the Cathedral, complexity of form, and triumphant verticality make it a major monument of the English Baroque period.

Wren returned to England after travels in France in the 1660s and brought with him architectural books, drawings, engravings, and a great admiration of French classical Baroque design. St. Paul’s was to be the central point of Wren’s visionary redesign of London, where streets were to be extended from it. His artistic vision was to crown London’s skyline with a great domed church like the great European cities. Wren envisioned a modern European city with a series of intersecting avenues. But it was not to be had and the city remained along its ancient topographical lines.

The sheer enormity of St. Paul’s must have struck the everyday eighteenth-century Londoner with such awe at the ability and modern power to create such a building. In a time when life was dangerous, poverty was rampant, and destitution was a reality, the solidity of St. Paul’s Cathedral hopefully provided inspiration and hope as “as a magnificent testament to the boundless ambitions of men” to many, as it did for Eliza.

Sources:
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
Art History by Marilyn Stokstad