Day 4 – Saturday

Saturday started off on the same plan – breakfast pastries and hot chocolate at Caffe Nero in the Tube mall area, except I got the added bonus of using the mall hotspot to find out that my nephew had been born on Friday! That was exciting.

We jumped on the Tube and headed off to the British Library. The British Library is the English equivalent of the Library of Congress – it gets every book, magazine, newspaper, etc. that is printed in the U.K., so in addition to having 600 million items in the library, they get another 8,000 a day to process. Talk about job security.

The Library is in an enormous new brick building that is very well done. It looks nice from the outside, and it has a large courtyard with an abstract Isaac Newton out front. The inside of the building was designed (with good success) to make the large spaces feel smaller and more comfortable. It does this through uses of different elevations and different ceiling levels. It works quite well.

We decided we wanted a paid guided tour of the Library, but we had a little time to kill, so we headed into the Library showcase area, where many of the rarest books are kept on rotating display. We only got to see a few manuscripts for some novels (Austen, anyone?) before we had to dash back to the front counter to get our tickets. We waited on a bench shaped like a book chained to a ball, which we found out was how books were kept in the old days when you did not want people walking off with your copy.

The tour group was about 10 people or so, and our tour guide was fantastic. I really wish I had gotten up the nerve to get a picture of her – I know that Jo would have loved this woman. She was in her early 20s, had on HUGE platform shoes with black and white striped socks (Cat-in-the-Hat style), and a few piercings, but she still came across as fun and even sweet. She had style! She also knew a ton about the Library. She gave us stories on the Library’s origins (the donation of private libraries of four men started the whole thing), the architecture (a huge building with a ship in mind, so many of the windows are round), the five basement levels that house 60% of the collection (the rest is scattered around London and the rest of England), and so on. She told of how most of the collection was moved in vans when the Library was moved about 10 years ago, but the rarest of items (the Magna Carta and such) could not be insured, so they were taken (very quietly) across London by staff in taxis.

We got to go into a staff room to see the spiffy book transport system. Most books can be put in trays and then sent off on computer controlled conveyors that run all through the building. The computer can bypass traffic jams in the system, and can track books throughout the system as well. It is miles and miles long, and was pretty nifty to see.

Our tour included looking at the outside of the central space where the library of one of the former king is housed – it was originally going to be space for card catalogs, but by the time the building was built, computers had taken over that task (except, oddly, for one reading room – Africa and Asian Studies – where they still have a card catalog for the older people who prefer cards) and so they converted the space to display the king’s books. You can actually request any book in the library – even ancient ones if you can prove you need the original (for paper analysis or the like). Anyone can get a card, with the card lasting roughly the estimated time you will need it – a few weeks for a visiting tourist though several years for a PhD candidate.

After the tour, we went back to the rare book collection. The have original manuscripts and printings from earliest surviving Bibles to Shakespeare’s signature to scrawled Beatles lyrics on a napkin. It is quite an impressive collection. They also have two copies of the Magna Carta, but the better copy was in another display area temporarily, so we had to make do with one that was illegible to me.

We did make the required stop at the gift shop, where Mer escaped with me just buying one CD set of some famous Shakespearean speeches.

After the British Library, we made our way (via Tube, of course) to St. Paul’s. What a wonderful cathedral. The current St. Paul’s was built after the Great Fire of 1666, and it is superb. It is harmonious inside – none of the maze-like feeling of Westminster. The central space opens into the smaller inside dome, and it gives the space an open feel. I really loved this church.

We picked up the audio self-tour, and (per Rick Steves’s instructions), we went up into the Whispering Gallery up in the dome. The Gallery is called Whispering because if you whisper next to the dome wall on one side of the gallery, the sound is supposed to travel all the way around the inside of the dome to your friend on the other side of the dome. We never found out. The Whispering Gallery is the lowest section of the dome, but is still very high up. You are right up next to the paintings of the life of St. Paul. That is cool. What is not cool is the fact that you are on a small sidewalk-esque area with a guardrail, and lots of empty space. I sat in the Gallery as long as I could stand it (about 3-5 minutes), and then I went back down the “up” stairs since the “down” stairs were on the other side of the dome. Mer turned to whisper to me only to find that I had gone. Mer went on to the next level of the dome, which was higher still, and eventually met me sitting on a bench safely on a landing of the stairs going down.

We toured the main level. Sadly (from a harmony perspective), there is an obscenely huge and elaborate tomb on one side of the main floor – I can’t even tell you whose it is. The audio guides did an admirable job in my opinion – they welcomed people of all faiths (or none), and then went on to explain what the church meant to those of the Christian faith. It was a nice balance of presenting what Christians believe without being in-your-face about it.

The church has a commitment to bringing in contemporary Christian art, to extend the long tradition of Christian artist. The were two large painting right as you came to the dome area, and near the alter was a modern take on Mary with Jesus as a child – just two curved stones suggesting a mother and child. It was well done.

The back of the church had been bombed during WW 2 – the only part of the church that was lost. It was rebuilt with a new altar in the design that had been originally drawn up by the architect, Christopher Wren, but that had not originally been built. So, Wren got the altar he wanted after all. Behind the altar, a small space was set apart as a chapel in memory of the Americans who died fighting in England. It was very touching, and I liked it very much.

After the main floor, we followed our audio guides downstairs to the crypt. Even the crypt has high ceilings and so does not feel crowded. There are famous people buried here (Lord Nelson and Florence Nightingale), and they continue to honor people here. There was a plaque on the wall in memory of a member of the St. Paul’s society who had died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

We finished our tour as the afternoon approached 5:00, and while Meredith was in the restroom, I watched two small and cute girls skipping around the crypt. Two girls skipping happily over dead people’s tombs was a happy and healthy reminder that life goes on.

We decided to stay at St. Paul’s for the 5:00 Evensong service (after flipping a coin – St. Paul’s versus going to dinner). We sat under the dome, and we even got to sing a few hymns! So now I can drop into conversations, “When I sang at St. Paul’s in London….” The music was wonderful – the acoustics were tremendous, and the church was beautiful. I loved it – even better than Westminster. I even decided that if we were going to go to an Advent service on Sunday (which both churches were having), we would go to St. Paul’s (unless we were right at Westminster on Sunday – Mer was in charge of locations and times).

After the service, we Tubed it back to Victoria Station so we could get our long-sought-after bus tour of London  by night. We had a little time, and our breakfast had run thin, so we grabbed a quick snack at KFC in the station’s mall. We figured it would hold us until after the hour-long tour, and then we could get a real meal.

We were first in line when the bus pulled up. True to American form, we both thought at first that the bus had pulled up in such a way as we were going to have to cross in front of it, but that wasn’t so. Those wacky Brits and their right-hand driver’s seats! We climbed on board and paid for the trip, and headed straight up to the upper level and took the front seats. We could look right outside the bus – in fact, it turned out to be a strange perspective. Since we were in front above the driver, it kept looking as if we were going to hit things. We never did, but we both wondered how we missed things.

The snack was a wise idea, because it turns out the tour was two hours long. It went all over London – through the shopping district, by Parliament, across London Bridge, over by the Eye, across Tower Bridge, by the Tower, over by St. Paul’s, and through the old city of London. It was neat to take the trip after we had been Tubing around London for a few days. On the Tube, you just sort of “pop up” from place to place. I never had a good feeling for where things were in relation to each other. The bus tour took us by all the familiar places, and helped me tie the city together. The only slight downside to the tour was it was cold outside, so our window fogged up some, and the last 1/3 of the tour was in rain, which cut down on some of the visibility. Our driver was also our tour guide, and did an okay job – he was a little wry, and I appreciated his humor.

As the bus pulled into Victoria Station, I caught a glimpse of a Spaghetti House restaurant. Since I had enjoyed it so much a few nights before, we went to this different one for dinner. We both got pizzas, and just beat out closing. Our waiter seemed to be the manager, and was another real Italian, although when we talked with him, he said most of the people at the restaurant were foreigners, but not Italians. It really is amazing how many non-British there are in London! Our waiter/manager also kept letting people in after closing, so he seemed to be a pretty nice guy as well. We ordered dessert, and our Italian wanted to know why Americans always get dessert after dinner (I think Italians take it mid-day). We did not have a great answer, but Mer proposed that it was so we could end on a high note. It was a satisfying meal.

After supper, we walked back to the station and grabbed a Tube line for home. Another successful day of touring in London.