I had the privilege this month of taking a group of terrific
college students to the UK for a literary tour of England. Our itinerary: London, Windsor, Oxford,
Winchester, Stonehenge, Bath, Stratford-on-Avon, Thirsk, York, and
Cambridge.
It’s not like any of these locations are obscure—you might
think Thirsk is the outlier in this list of great English towns, but you might know
it better by its fictional name of Darrowby, the home of James Herriot the
Yorkshire vet—so Google will do a better job than I could of providing great
photos of iconic buildings and vistas. Instead,
here are some of my own favorite shots of the places we visited, interspersed
with little nuggets shared by our splendid tour guides (accuracy not
guaranteed)!
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| Big Ben on the Thames. True to form, like almost all the major monuments I have ever visited, it was under scaffolding. |
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| Westminster Abbey |
According to our guide at Westminster Abbey, Winston Churchill reportedly drank a Magnum of champagne a day. This has nothing to do with anything; I just
think it’s remarkable.
Until very recently, there were no toilets in the abbey, so during coronations and weddings, which lasted for hours on end, men
were issued a bottle and women were given what our guide described as a cradle. Now that's commitment.
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| Tourists getting their picture taken in King's Cross |
King's Cross Station, much to the dismay of commuters, is now
a major tourist attraction. Since the
actual space between Platforms 9 and 10 is a modern contraption of metal and
glass, some enterprising soul has glued a trolley to an out-of-the-way expanse
of brick so that Harry Potter fans can have their picture taken “going through
the wall” at Platform 9 ¾.
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| Picadilly Circus. He's a bit dwarfed by the Underground sign, which is closer to the camera, but you can see the silhouette of Eros against the neon backdrop. |
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| A carousel on the south bank of the Thames (the London Eye in the background, of course) |
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| Saint Paul's and the Millennium Bridge |
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| Swans at Eton |
All the mute swans (the ones with orange bills) belong to
the queen. Apparently they count them
every year so that she knows how many she has.
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| The Windsor Guildhall |
Christopher Wren designed the Windsor Guildhall so that the
portico was supported by pillars only on the outside. However, people were so sure the thing would
collapse that Wren was forced to add pillars at intervals under the roof as
well. He had the last laugh, though: the
pillars don’t actually touch the ceiling!
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| Windsor Castle |
The flight path to Heathrow goes right over Windsor
Castle. Strangely, the queen seems not
to mind.
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| If you can't read the caption under the Turf Tavern sign, it says, "An Education in Intoxication." |
Just about every town has a pub that claims to be the oldest
in England. The one at Oxford that makes
that claim is the Turf Tavern, where lots of famous people have become
inebriated and where Clinton very famously “never inhaled.”
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| The ceiling of Divinity Hall, Oxford |
We donate money to organizations to have our names put on
bricks in the sidewalk.
In the late
Middle Ages, apparently people donated money to have their initials and crests
engraved in the ceiling.
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| The Radcliffe Camera, seen through the window of Divinity Hall, which is where Professor McGonagall taught Harry and Ron to dance in the fourth movie |
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| A lonely lamppost oddly placed in the middle of nowhere at
the university where C.S. Lewis taught.
Inspiration for Narnia? |
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| The crypt in Winchester Cathedral |
Usually crypts are where you bury people. You can’t bury people in the crypt at
Winchester cathedral (Jane Austen is buried upstairs) because it floods when it
rains—as shown here. Instead, they put a
statue in the middle of the floor, which is occasionally submerged up to the
knees. I think it looks like he’s
checking his phone.
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| Memorial to William Walker in Winchester Cathedral |
William Walker almost single-handedly saved Winchester
Cathedral by laying an artificial foundation underwater when the original
foundation was flooded and shifting. He
worked alone in the dark for six years.
Apparently they gave the sculptor a photo with two people in
it; he naturally assumed the one in the diving suit was Walker and happily
produced a statue as tribute to him.
Unfortunately, Walker was the other guy in the picture, and for a long
time there was a statue on display of the wrong person. Eventually someone paid to have a new sculpture
made with the right face (complete with the bushy mustache).
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| A tiny carved face on the choir screen of Winchester Cathedral |
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| The "Round Table" in the Great Hall, which is all that remains of Winchester Castle |
This isn’t the real Round Table of Arthurian fame. It’s a late-medieval reproduction, painted in
Henry VIII’s time (hence the Tudor rose in the middle). Clearly he didn’t get the democratic idea
behind the roundness of the table, because Arthur (who looks rather like Henry,
if you can get close enough to see) is clearly at the supposedly non-existent head
of it.
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| Stonehenge |
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| I love the destination sign on the buses that go between the
car park and Stonehenge: “TO THE STONES.” |
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| Marlborough Buildings, Bath |
Jane Austen didn’t like Bath. However, she set several of her novels here:
these are the Marlborough Buildings, where Colonel Wallis and his wife live in
Persuasion. According to our guide,
these homes were built as a windbreak to shelter the Royal Crescent, the row of
apartments where the posh people lived.
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| Pulteney Bridge, Bath |
If you recognize the weir below Pulteney Bridge, it’s because
in the recent film of Les Miserables, it doubles for the Seine in the scene
where Javert (Russell Crowe) commits suicide.
Apparently the dummy they threw into the water for filming disappeared in
the current and hasn’t yet resurfaced.
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| At the Georgian Tearooms, Bath |
I’m usually not one for food photography, but this was such
a pretty little cream tea (tea and a scone with preserves and clotted cream) I thought it was worth
commemorating.
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| The Roman Baths, Bath |
They have holographic films playing around the baths to show
how people would have used them in the Roman era. Shockingly to American eyes, half the people
in these films are completely naked, though shown exclusively from the back.
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| Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, Stratford-on-Avon |
Shakespeare’s grave doesn’t make for an interesting photo
because the inscription (“Good friend, for Jesus’s sake forebear to dig the
dust interred here…”) only reads right-side up if you’re standing at the altar
facing the congregation, which of course they frown on unless you’re the
minister.
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| Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-on-Avon |
Graffiti isn’t new.
We saw people’s initials carved on churches all over England—and even on
the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.
At Shakespeare’s birthplace, people started scratching their initials on
the windows as soon as the place became a tourist attraction. The oldest windows have been removed and put
in display cases, but we spotted initials dating to the 19th century
on these.
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| A set from the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, now housed in the old garage of the veterinary surgery in Thirsk |
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| Snow in the Hambleton Hills, Yorkshire |
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| More snow on the Hambleton Hills |
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| York |
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| The River Ouse, York |
York is probably my favorite city in England. That’s not something a tour guide told me: I
came up with it on my own.
What the tour guide did tell us was that a York chocolatier invented
a delightful chocolate-covered wafer called Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp that
took the world by storm—but not until its name was changed to Kit Kat!
The British and American recipes are different, apparently
because when they were first produced in the UK they had to use powdered milk,
which gives them almost a malted flavor.
Which recipe is better depends entirely on which side of the Pond you’re
from.
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| A table for the cost of gowns for the various college of Cambridge University |
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| The Eagle Pub, Cambridge |
The Eagle pub keeps its upper window open all the time. According to the story, a little girl burned
to death in a fire in that room because she couldn’t get out the window, and it’s
kept open now so that she’ll never be trapped again. On a lighter note, Wilkins and Crick, two of
the discoverers of DNA, apparently did as much work in this pub as they did in
the Cavendish Laboratories down the street.
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| Godfrey Washington's memorial plaque in Little St. Mary's Church, Cambridge |
George Washington’s great-uncle was the vicar of Little St.
Mary’s Church, where he was buried in 1729.
His family coat of arms looks suspiciously like a two-toned version of
the American flag, doesn’t it? And their
family mascot was the eagle….
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| A road to the river in Cambridge |
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| Peeking through college gates in Cambridge |
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| Punting on the River Cam |
I have lots of fun pictures of my students (including a
bunch from the epic snowball fight we had on the day we visited Thirsk!), but for the sake of their privacy I won’t post them here.
It was such an honor to travel with them, and I’m grateful that they gave me an opportunity to share this lovely country with them—even if it was
in the middle of winter!
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| On the Thames, London |
