Day Trip to London

  

We had a nice St Patricks Day Formal dinner on 16 March. The 17th loomed grey so we set off for London. From King's Cross, we made our way over to the City of London Museum. The Tube was a mess. I'm not sure how I managed to take these photos with no people because it was more crowded than ever. Much work needs to be done to get the Tube ready for the Jubilee and Olympics. The work can only be done on weekends as they have to close down so many lines.

   

We wanted to see the Dickens and London show at the City of London Museum. As we anticipated, it            
was interesting and especially exciting for me to see the first page of the Bleak House MS where that    dinosaur appears (provoking memories of a paper I wrote about the origin of that dinosaur for the Great Exhibition of 1851)--here are Dickens's words:    




              Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly        
              retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty 
              feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.


There were beautiful and not-so-well-known paintings of Dickens's London and even the sounds of London dialects on audio phones that Dickens would have heard. But the best part was a film, The Houseless Shadow, made by William Raban that follows the words of Dickens' essay "Night Walks"(1860) and the footsteps of Dickens in contemporary London. Dickens suffered from insomnia and walked the city "in the small hours," noting the poor homeless people and what life was like for them. Rabon does the same and his images are as dark and fitting for Dickens's words as they are for today's world.


We walked around the Museum and saw other interesting exhibits--The Victorian Walk is fun and shows lovely manequins dressed up for a promenade with harlequins entertaining.

Her Fascinator looks familiar!

There are still old Victorian lamposts around.

Toy Store Window

Art Deco Pub Window

The Museum has interactive exhibits such as this London Wheel!

This graph shows WWII's damage to the city of London 
as the population dropped 4 1/2 million people between 1939 and 1945

We left and walked along the London Wall.

 

We ate lunch in a favorite cafe in the Barbican. In the summer time this place is green and crowded but not much was going on that day.

We walked over to the Thames via St Pauls, where we saw a wedding and other interesting sights; then across the Millenium Bridge to Tate Modern to see the big Yayoi Kusama show. What fun that was!

Man without a Head

The Shard is almost complete. 
It will be the tallest skyskraper in the European Union.

Birch Copse in front of Tate Modern

 Kusama is now in her 80s and lives and creates her art in a Mental Institution in Japan 

Kusama is famous for Performance Art in NYC during the 60s

and she is said to have outperformed Andy Warhol! 

It was fun to see young admirers at the Tate.

Inside one room of her exhibition.
Kevin is there to the right of red light. 

She is famous for her polka dots but she creates much interesting art.

We couldn't resist buying this originally illustrated Alice in Wonderland by Kusama.

The Grin of the Chesire Cat!

Kusama Stickers

 We caught a train back to Cambridge and had to stand most of the way as it was so crowded, but then we had a nice supper at the Granta Pub.

And saw these silvery punts on the way home.