london

here’s a button you can press next to Buckingham Palace.
tourists can press the button and all the lights in the palace turn on, a twinkly tune is played and the queen and all her family pop out of the upstairs windows like a cookoo clock. perhaps.

click to enjoy an enlargment opportunity

we took the girls to london yesterday to go to the V&A museum, followed by a walk to Oxford Circus (via the Diana Memorial, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus).
The V&A is a funny old place. We didn’t get on very well thanks in part to a tired kezia, but depsite quite a few activity things for kids, it’s not really ‘their’ sort of museum – ie lots of boring things in display cases !
But just look at the size of these things on display !

click to inspect

i met a friend for lunch yesterday in the british museum and we had a look at the exhibition of badges which were there.
it’s a very small exhibition, but i enjoyed it.

in order to find a train which still has spare seats i got the 6.08 train from my local station this morning. this meant my walk across london was slightly less crowded than usual

do you ever have mental time travel moments ? they happen quite a lot in london. you see something and think “if i’d been standing in this spot hundreds of years ago i probably would have seen this exact same thing’
here is one such vision. i suspect the metal riot railings might be slightly contemporary.

it was my work’s christmas party last night and we decided to drive across london to the venue.
i still find it amazing you can just drive in to the centre of london and look out of your car window at all the sights. it’s a bit like a safari trip.
anyway, it took us longer to get across london than it did to reach london to begin with, and when we got nearly there we found a fantastic free street parking place (we’d been expecting a £20 car park).
but how would we remember which street we’d parked the car in ? well, by looking for this handy monument we parked under.

these spikes and barbed wire keep people out of the queen’s back garden in the middle of london.
but what if they are actually to stop the queen escaping ? perhaps she’s sick of being the monarch and hankers after a quiet life in a suburban terrace house somewhere ?
these protection measures are there to keep her, and therefore the empire, from disappearing.

click for a big zoom

i see a lot of london blue plaques in my daily wanderage but i don’t want to overburden you with boring things so i usually don’t take their photos.
i was impressed by this one on Denmark Street (aka Tin Pan Alley). I was down there earlier looking at Telecasters. Above ‘Rockers’ guitar shops (claiming to beat the price on any Fender) was this sign informing us that Augustus Siebe, pioneer of the Diving Helmet lived and worked here.
with the volume of guitar widdling in the music shop i could have done with a diving helmet myself.

another man who could do with wearing a helmet is telco john who just came back from lunch with a trendy-boy haircut:

the poppy petals were still around this morning. apparently there was one dropped for every person who died in recent wars (including 1st and 2nd).
some cleaners were busy sweeping the memories up, but there were still lots left.

i was at a meeting last night which finished just before 6pm so we could go out and watch a couple of old planes fly over and drop pettles on london. so we did.
unfortunately it was dark and although i saw the fly by i didn’t get a decent photo so won’t show you (this never normally stops me!).
lots of the bridges were lit up in red and the whole town was full of people.
projections on a building and dropped petals:

and i finally found out what these lights were for:

the search lights remained searching way after the planes had gone:

(bottom left bigable by the method of clicking)

it’s the Lord Major’s show in london at the weekend and strange things are appearing all over the place. i assume these lights in plastic bubbles are somehow related.
they looked like giant bubble wrap. can you imagine the satisfaction in popping one !

click to inspect

i’ve often taken pictures of the blue tourist signs on the walls of famous buildings indicating that a famous person once lived there. often people have asked if there’s more info about them, but until now i’ve not found any.
but today i found this (low bandwidth) which is part of the english heritage site (search for blue plaque).
there’s a searchable list at blueplaque.com and a complete list on the english heritage site here