AoC - Day the Third: in which I get claustrophobic and cultured

At this time of year, the changing of the guards ceremony at Buckingham Palace is performed every other day, and in bad weather, not at all. I was also informed that you can see a similar ceremony at St James Palace, and you can get right up close to it, rather than seeing it through gates.

And did you know that many of the retired royal household staff are given an apartment free of charge in St James Palace until they die? It's call "grace and favor," and seems a nice return from the royal family for services rendered.

I walked through St James Park again on Tuesday morning in hopes that I might catch the ceremony at St James Palace, but the yucky weather was perhaps too much for the soldiers because they weren't even out standing guard, let alone changing themselves around. And yet there I was, a Yankee girl braving the weather. Sheesh.

It wasn't a total loss, though, because I found the horseguards, and the rain let up a bit, so I watched their changing ceremony instead.





My next stop was the Cabinet War Rooms. Not to be confused with the Imperial War Museum. On my way there, I passed this well-known address:


There are gates at the front of the street to keep people from going down to see the Famous Black Door, and they're situated in just such a way that you can't even see The Door from a distance, so the street sign will have to do. (By the way, Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown are quite unpopular with the locals.)

There are a ton of memorial statues in London. This is one of my favorites, though. Each outfit represents a different type of work that women did to help the war effort.




Here are some government buildings - administration and finance, I think:


At the other end of those buildings is an inconspicuous and unassuming little entryway to the Cabinet War Rooms. You can see the cluster of people going into it in the lower right corner, and there are still sandbags on top of it:


You guessed it - no pics allowed inside, but here's the description of it:

The Cabinet War Rooms were Churchill's underground headquarters during World War II. It has 27 rooms and was used between 1939 and 1945 to keep the government and the war effort running. The rooms were sealed on August 16, 1945, with everything left just as it was. A group of people lobbied to have it unsealed and turned into a museum in the 1970s. It was opened to the public sometime in the early 1980s.

When people in London talk about "the war," there is only one war they are referring to. London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights. Imagine being down in that bunker and hearing what must have sounded like the end of the world going on above you.

It's dim and cramped down there. Secretaries had sleeping quarters there, and More Important People might have gotten their own small room that contained a small, dark wood desk and chair, a wash stand, and an uncomfortable-looking military-issue bed with thin sheets and blankets. Churchill's personal rooms weren't much fancier, although he did have what looked like a slightly thicker quilt on his bed. Apparently, he only slept there three times.

You can see an open packet of sugar cubes on one military officer's desk. They would have been preciously rationed. A copy of a movie magazine with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh on the cover is tucked away on a bookshelf. In the Map Room, the walls are covered with maps of the war zones with pins still stuck in them to show military routes. Churchill used the Cabinet Room, which is filled with desks, to meet with his war cabinet and chiefs of staff as well as the Defense Committee. The Transatlantic Telephone Room was connected to a scrambler and allowed Churchill to talk to FDR and plot strategy. This room was a broom closet originally.

There's also a museum dedicated to Churchill down there. You can see his baby rattle, his famous black, fur-trimmed overcoat, a velvet casual jumpsuit (or maybe it's pajamas?), his walking stick, his paint palette, and a state-of-the-art lifeline, which is a 15-meter-long interactive table that displays information from every year of his life, even down to specific weeks and days. Even today, he's considered one of the greatest British statesmen who ever lived.

After my tour of this space, I needed to get back outside. Fortunately, the War Rooms are on a side of St James Park that I hadn't seen yet, so I had stroll in the Park before heading to the National Gallery.

This is a gardener's house - used for display and storage now, rather than living quarters.


I spent the afternoon at the National Gallery, which is just off Trafalgar Square. Not many pigeons there these days - seed sellers are banned.



One entertaining feature of the Square is the Fourth Plinth. It's normally used to display statues. From July 6th to October 14th this year, citizens were invited to do their own thing on it. Each person who volunteers gets an hour on the plinth. Some get up there and dance. Some finish writing novels in the wee hours. Others advertise causes, like this guy (notice the net around the plinth in case you accidentally fall off):


On my way to the Gallery, I stopped for lunch in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Several churches in London have cafes down in the crypts.


The National Gallery has an impressive collection of European art. Again, no pictures allowed. What was most interesting to me was to see how the use of perspective was developed over the centuries - the further on you get, the more dimensional the paintings look. My favorite was probably Holbien's The Ambassadors. Those Italian Renaissance painters could create amazing 3-D images without computers. That weird blob you see on the floor of the painting is actually a skull. If you move to the right of the painting and then walk up close to it, you see the distorted image magically correct itself.

Picadilly Circus is a few minutes' walk from Trafalgar Square, and I hadn't done much shopping yet. I found Fortnum and Mason - the Queen's grocery store - and bought some tea and toffee. The ground floor (what we'd call the first floor) has tea, coffee, cakes, and candy. The basement (they call it "lower ground floor") is the fanciest and cleanest grocery store I've ever seen. You can get cheese, deli meat, fish, wine, fruits and vegetables, and bottles and jars and cans ("tins") of spreads and jellies and whatnot. And don't even get me started on the other floors, which are the department-store sections of the joint.

The Burlington Arcade is on this street as well - it's like a fancy alley of boutiques.

I needed a sit-down by this point (cobblestone streets are murder on the feet), so I went into the courtyard of the Royal Academy. There was a huge outdoor exhibit of what looked like giant silver Christmas balls:


Tomorrow's post is about another church and a trip out of London.