A Walk Through the Streets of London

It is a cold and blustery morning in London. Squalls of snow blow through occasionally, although never leaving more than a skiff on the ground.

It is also Easter Sunday. I'm not sure what to expect, but I anticipate perhaps some of the pageantry such as one may see during Holy Week in Spain. Being Easter weekend, this massive city is packed with travelers like ourselves, seeking to get a taste of the British capital.

We begin at the Horse Guards Parade, a large parade ground just off of St. James Park, where a changing of the guard ceremony is taking place. Uniformed men are dressed in black tunics and gold helmets with red plumes. They march their horses and face their counterparts, who are dressed in red tunics. Mounted on black horses they face each other for about thirty minutes, then ride away. It is interesting, but not a whole lot to it (to my untrained eye), and certainly not what we expected.

A short walk leads us to Trafalgar Square, where the towering “Nelson's Column” is surrounded by four lions taking guard. We just happen to be here during a friendly “Free Tibet” protest.

In the middle of the square is pleasant fountain of water. In the basin of the fountain is a statue of several mermaids, a shark, and dolphin, with water shooting from their mouths. The square also shares the front steps to the National Gallery, a huge (free) museum of classical paintings, including Rembrandt, da Vinci, and Van Gogh.

We walk along The Mall, a street that leads from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. It is flanked on one side by St. James Park, a repository of trees and ponds. From here we can see what I suppose to be the tops of white buildings on Downing Street (where the Prime Minister lives), and also the tower of Big Ben.

When we arrive at Buckingham Palace, the first thing we notice is that the British Flag is raised. That means that the queen is in.

We watch the sentinel standing motionless in a blue-gray uniform next to one of the doors, his rifle held tight in his right arm, barrel facing up. He looks young, like a kid still in high school. On this blustery day, it is no surprise that his cap blows off. The sentinel holds motionless and another man walks up, scoops the cap from the ground, and replaces it to his head.

Walking away from Buckingham Palace now, and toward the House of Parliament, we stroll along Birdcage Walk. This road flanks the other side of St. Jame's Park and has a large canopy of oak trees.

Nearby is Westminster Abbey, the Gothic church where British royalty have been coronated since William the Conqueror in 1066. Princess Diana had her marriage and her funeral here.

I would like to go inside, but on the Easter Sunday, the line is out the door. We decide to move on.

Our path takes us around Parliament Square and to Great George Street where we find this view of Parliament with a traditional London cabbie.

In another five minutes, we are on Westminster Bridge, crossing the River Thames. Looking on the south side of the bridge, there is a great view of Big Ben and the House of Parliament . . .

. . . and looking on the north side, an awesome view of the London Eye.

Soon we are on the South Bank making a mandatory visit to London Bridge. There is nothing special about the bridge that is here now—it is just steel and concrete. But the bridges of the past, beginning in Roman days, must have been special enough that a nursery rhyme was written about one of them. The last London Bridge that was “falling down” was sold to an American in 1968. It was torn down, shipped overseas to Lake Havasu, Arizona, where it was pieced back together.

We are sightseeing on The Queen's Walk, a promenade on the south bank of the River Thames. From here, we look across the river and see “The City,” or the financial district of London.

The weather is soggy and very chilly. Our umbrellas have been put to good use. While on The Queens Walk, we stop for a picture with Tower Bridge in the background.

Just before crossing the Tower Bridge we catch our only glimpse of the Easter celebration in London. A man dressed in a bunny suit roams up and down the sidewalk with no particular purpose. This secular icon is disappointing to me, showing no semblance of Holy Week in Spain.

We cross Tower Bridge, just as we would cross any bridge. It is truly an elegant structure, with two Victorian Towers and light-blue suspension cables, but it is too cold to enjoy much of the detail. While crossing, we take a picture looking out over the Thames, toward the HMS Belfast, London's floating naval museum.

Now back on the North Bank, the Tower of London is our next goal. Our first challenge is to buy tickets. We wait in line for thirty minutes to purchase two tickets at £30 a piece. The lines are long and I notice that most of the tourists are from Spain. Sometimes it seems as if 70% of the language I hear on the street is Castillian Spanish. Now I know where Spain disappears to during Holy Week.

But Spaniards aren't the only ones here. London has people from everywhere in the world. While waiting outside the ticket line, we spot this group of men with turbans on their heads, eating lunch.

The Tower of London was built in 1078 by William the Conqueror. It served primarily as a Royal residence and has also housed the Crown Jewels.

Yeomen Warders, or Beefeaters as they are more commonly known, traditionally served as prison guards and custodians to the Crown Jewels. Now days, they act as tour-guides.

The tower is famous for its prison. An underground chamber displays common torture methods, including being hung from manacles, and stretched on the rack. There is also a large metal ring that wraps around the prisoner and painfully squeezes his body together.

Many prisoners within the tower etched their names as graffiti onto the walls. One was Thomas Steven[s] from 1540, imprisoned for highway robbery. This greatly catches my attention because in my own genealogy I have four generations of Thomas Stevens, and the furthest one I can trace back puts him in or near London in 1575. Still a little too late to be the Thomas Stevens from The Tower prison, but maybe it was a dad, or grandfather.

Next we venture into The City, which on Easter day is a deserted borough with a narrow two-lane road sandwiched between skyscrapers. I am looking for Cornhill. I don't know of any points of interest here, other than Dickens mentions it in his book, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge begrudgingly lets his store clerk go home for the holiday. “. . . the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town, as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's buff.”

We find Cornhill, which doesn't appear to be much of a hill—which may or may not be the Cornhill of Dicken's novel—and we walk along it for a short period until it comes to a merging intersection with Threadneedle Street. On a concrete pedestal is a statue of the Duke of Wellington riding his horse.

Not too far away is St. Paul's Cathedral. The front steps of the church was the setting for Mary Poppin's song, Feed the Birds, where the old lady is selling bags of crumbs, and birds are flying all around her.

We are able to step inside the cathedral and stay toward the back of the chapel, free of charge. The interior is well-lit, high, and symmetrical. The distinguishing feature, however, is the dome, which is the second largest cathedral dome in the world. They say that at the base of the dome, you can whisper and hear it from the other side.

We stop at a little pastry shop and eat a Cornish Pastry before getting on the tube and riding the red line to Oxford Circus. It is now getting dark as we emerge back above ground and find ourselves on Oxford Street. We discover a book store where I buy a good Jeffery Archer novel for the plane trip home. We buy the kids some souvenirs at a gift shop.

We are in the Soho area of London, and soon we encounter Gerrard Street, the gateway to Chinatown. We walk beneath the ornately decorated paifang, or Chinese gate. All the writing on the buildings is now in Chinese script and store-front windows display Asian goods and even ducks roasting on a spit. Stores are full of exotic produce and fish.

After Chinatown, it is just a small walk past Leicester Square and on to Coventry Street until we are at Piccadilly Circus. This popular iconic spot is the junction of seven different streets and home to a large neon sign that draws comparisons to Times Square in New York. It is now dark and Piccadilly Circus is a panorama of well-lit buildings and in the middle of them all a statue of Eros.

Inside one of the adjacent buildings we find a shopping mall of sorts, and there a quaint Moroccan-style restaurant. We sit down at a low table and order a late-evening meal. We are very tired and ready to call it the night.

After our meal, we descend the stairs to the underground, and take the tube to our hotel.