Last week, we went to meet up with some friends in the City of London. The actual City of London, not London. It’s confusing. To get there, we walked quite a long way down The Strand, and popped into the courtyard of Somerset House, where we saw lots of pretend flowers:
Out of Sync, by Fernando Casasempere
There are 10,000 ceramic daffodils in this art installation. Pretty impressive. I’d never been to Somerset House before. I hope to go back and look at it all properly one day. Finally, we arrived at the Twining’s tea shop with friends now in tow, only to find they don’t serve tea – they only sell packets of it! Silly us, we should have checked before we went there. However, there was a nice cafe next-door, where Mr C had the richest hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.
It was like a sort of hot, runny chocolate mousse – really delicious-, but I don’t think I could have drunk it all as it was so sweet and rich. Mr C managed to, though – well, apart from the bits we snaffled. I had some nice soup, and we all had cake, and then we headed off into the City itself, where one of our friends works as an archivist. She was an excellent tour guide! We walked past St Paul’s Cathedral…
…and on into the built-up City. I don’t think I’d ever been in the actual City of London before. It was a Sunday, so it was very quiet. The only people we saw were police officers, couriers, and about five other toursity-looking people.
The buildings in Guildhall Square are a funny mixture of really old and new-ish (60′s?). Not entirely pleasing to the eye, but quite interesting. We saw one of the very early police boxes that were put around the City of London in the early days of the City of London Police (c1907). They originally contained a phone (obviously!), and a first-aid kit, and the space underneath the shelves was unofficially used as a storage place for police officers’ shopping on market days (or so our guide informed us)!
It was a most interesting afternoon. We learned a lot about the City of London, and had a good walk round, and of course it was nice to see our friends again. I took lots more photos, some of which you can see on Flickr, if you want to.
apostrophe – opposite the Royal Courts of Justice – where library campaigners drink coffee, chocolate (and probably wish for something stronger) whilst waiting to find out what’s going on!
That’s the one!
I have been promising myself for ages that I will go to London again soon. It’s years since I’ve been. It’s really not all that far from where I live now – I think about two hours on the train.
The last time I went was when I lived in Manchester and it was quite a long journey. In fact it seemed a very, very long journey probably because I was in charge of a load of Brownies (I was a Young Leader).
The time before that was when I was about fourteen and I went on holiday with my friend and her family and we visited the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum and places like that. I did really enjoy the holiday but I think I was looking at things from a child’s (or young person’s) perspective – I had read ‘Ballet Shoes’ recently and was imagining that I was one of the Fossil girls.
So will definitely have to go to London soon! In the meantime have been enjoying all your lovely photos
Glad you like the photos. London is full of interesting things to do and see. It used to seem miles and miles away and was a special expedition when I was a child, but now I don’t really think too much about hopping on a train there.
I don’t think I’ve ever read ‘Ballet Shoes’.
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