Gower St

Perhaps the worst thing about London is their infinite capacity to capitalise on those parts of its appeal to foreigners with fanciful notions of 'quaint old England' by completley defacing the historic heritage of so many interesting sites.  And the most woeful of all travesties has been committed to a building I've always been quite keen to see, 221B Baker St, the residence of Sherlock Holmes the great detective himself.

It honestly brought me close to tears, what could have been a faithfully maintained, cleverly designed place of insight into London's turn of the century enthusiasm and charm, is instead a tourist museum, replete with all manner of shockingly tasteless souvenirs and tacky quotes unimaginativley strewn across a place I imagined so completley in my youthful fascinations.

I travelled far, far away.  Winding my way past a myriad of streets and statues, until I found a suitable substitute.  This door served as the first clue.

As one can see, the number 187 of Gower St has been strangley replaced.  Scuff marks mar the polished wood of the door and knocker too looks strangley out of place.  My dear Watson, it almost seems as though someone has replaced the number on the door!

But why ever would that be Holmes?  I'm going to end this pantomime here out of kindness to you, because I know through intuition rather than the science of deduction that this line of thought is not as interesting to you as it is to me.  I could go on for hours.  That said, if you've seen the new BBC series 'Sherlock' then you'll guess pretty quickly from the succession of images below that I managed to find the filming location of another 221B, one that actually looks the part.

If you haven't seen the new series, you really should.  Its currently running into its third season and has to be unequivocally one of the best series of the decade.  If you have, then I hope this post will provide some modicum of the excitment to you that it did for me.

While in all other respects unremarkable, this simple doorway illustrated to me something of London that visiting historical sites could not, the enduring nature of the city as a place of narrative.  The reminder that stories cannot be confined to rock and plaster alone was one that washed away the stains of rampant exploitation, and set me in good spirits for the rest of the day.  A subtle enough victory for Mr Holmes.

St Christopher's Chapel

To say that London is full of churches is like stating that the ocean is filled with plankton.  I know some people would have been quite happy to visit each and every one, but I feel as though those people would have then been very unhappy to have visited each and every one.  Honestly there are a lot of churches, how many? This many.  Not a good idea.

And so, instead of Westminster Abbey I found my way into the crowded foyer of the Great Ormond Childrens Hospital.  If you've ever been unfortunate enough to visit a childrens hospital, then you can imagine the decor, pleasant anthropomorphic characters splayed across the walls with alarmingly incongruent warnings about the dangers of infection and emergency procedures.  To find what I was looking for I had to go down a lift (with disco lighting) to the basement floor and then up another (sadly lacking in funk) to the first, after being turned around in the maze of wards for a few minutes I stepped into a very different sort of room.

What strikes you first about St Christopher's Chapel is how quiet it is, even surrounded by a hospital ward with the surgical hush of medicine and loving care, stepping into the chapel is akin to plunging ones head into water after a dive, noise ceases immediatley, you can hear your own blood.

The incredible and intricate details of the chapel, worked upon in 1875 by Edward. M. Barry an English architect of some note (no relation to J.M. Barrie the author of Peter Pan, though coincidentally he left all rights to that famous work to the hospital and they continue to draw funding from the royalties, there is a statue of Peter in the garden courtyard) were in their time criticised for their richness and beauty, the childrens hospital originally catoring to the poorest of London's children.  However much the hospital at large has modernised itself, the chapel has remained as a symbol from a more tender time.

Alongside the intense beauty of the place, it is also at once both remarkably small and intensley sad.  Barely eight meters squared it is so perfectly suited to its infant charges, and while the grand churches of London like St Pauls house the heroes of the nation, and have served to direct men in exhortation towards their worship of God for hundreds of years this tiny, beautiful chapel exists as a testament to the most earnest of prayers and saddest of losses.  A line of childrens toys line the mantle of the altar, as clear a depiction as any of the frescoes of the importance of hope in the darkest of times and in memory of the many praises given for life anew.

It is truly a beautiful place, and as I wandered out over the wonderful Florentine reproduction tiles the vicar smiled, and offered me a biscuit.

Grant Museum of Zoology

This excercise in perambulation starts, as many things do, with my childhood.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for museums, culitvated by what in hindsight seem like almost weekly trips to the Australian Museum on the corner of College and William street.  It has, I know now, one of the best biology departments in the world. But it also has skeletons, lots and lots of skeletons.  And from the whale hanging across the entry foyer, to the replicated Texan Allosaurus watching the entry corridor I loved bones as a child, I still do, there's something inherently fascinating about them.

My mother and father no doubt fervently hoped that I would fulfill this longing for dead things by becoming a biologist, and not a serial killer.  But as it so happens I did neither, instead that strange curiosity for skulls and femurs persisted as a cursory interest and nothing more.  As it so happens, this place was made for me.

The institution itself was founded in 1827 by one Robert Edmund Grant, who I cannot help but assume must have shared my stated interests, but the museum has an itensely practical purpose as well.  When the newly instated Grant sought to begin teaching the field of Zoology to students of the new University of London, he found to his dismay that there were no resources, no tangible links to the animal kingdom with which to demonstrate to his students, enter morbid insanity. 

 

While it is accurate enough to say that Grant was widely regarded as an astute man of science and a leader in his field, he left little impact on the course of popular history.  His name probably means as little to you as it does to me, unless you're a student of biology, or a sponge*, but under his tutelage a young student of natural sciences, Charles Darwin, would definitely go on to write something of value.

Now more than 177 years old the collection continues to grow.  In this manner, perhaps because of it, some of the things you find in the Grant Museum could only be described as a little, well, weird.  Now it's not as though I'm squeamish, or live in denial of the wondrous advances in scientific understanding that such research has produced.  But for goodness' sake, a jar of moles?  An entire jar?  What sort of scientific discourse requires the preservation  of that surrealist's nightmare?  I am of course aware that animals to be dissected need to be stored in some fashion, but that particular item didn't seem like it was available for usage in exam sessions. 

In every other way the place is entirely fascinating and only serves to prompt me to wonder at the means by which man accrued knowledge in the midst of the 19th century.  Setting out across the world in search of strange new horizons, noting their exotic biospheres and documenting bizarre creatures, before killing them all and storing them in jars.

*Grant's research into sponges and molluscs proved unequivocally that both were indeed members of the animal kingdom.  Yeah, the whole 'history passed him by' thing makes just that little bit more sense now doesn't it?

An Introduction

This is an account of my travels, void of anything even remotley resembling a tour.  I don't have any problem with tours, I just really don't like them very much.  I know a great deal of this is probably down to the way that tourists love to make themselves incredibly visible and incredibly annoying in all the parts of Australia that I treasure.  But there's something more to it than that I believe.  Think for a moment if you will of a young child, given free reign of Disneyland by his or her parents (or for the sake of this metaphor, a more cultured yet simultaneously safer Disneyland free from any of the hazards associated with heavy machinery or child abduction).

To think for a moment that a child might wait calmy for thirty minutes for those parents or some other adult to usher them onto a bus, that drives around seemingly aimlessly for the entire day, only to stop every so often to remark of one ride or another "Here is the Pirates of the Carribean ride, doesn't it look fun?  Yes? Well no time to ride it, we've got other rides to see!" seems utterly ludicrous.  And that to me is a London Tour bus, giving you a one window view of a thousand sights in one of the most incredible cities in the world only to get stuck in traffic on the turn off to Northumberland Avenue. 

But this is precisley what we tend to do, we lose the part of our brain that says to us 'Thats shiny! I wonder what that is?' and trade it for 'Show me something shiny and tell me what it does, here's £40'.  I, on the other hand followed my nose, wore holes in all my good socks and spent much more than that following up every stupid local rumor that sounded halfway interesting, thankfully some turned out to be precisley what I was looking for. 

So that's what this is, an account of my travels void of anything even remotley resembling a tour or common sense.  Though I like to think of it as proof that with friendly people, good looks and lots of walking you can always find something more interesting than the London Eye.  Or alternatively you can get lost in Covent Garden and walk around for two and a half hours.  It's a toss up.