Museum Of London, 2

Continuing our day at the Museum of London and environs...

Happy days are here again...for Royalists...Charles II parades into
London

Not so happy days, a Plague and a Fire

As noted earlier, I have a new theory of who was
responsible for the Fire: to be announced soon

Growth of science and industry

At about this point Vicki and I both are beginning to feel crushed
by all the history and art and architecture of the past few weeks...

A bit of reform history...still waiting too

First Black Cabs

Small girl's dress worn on the occasion of Queen
Elizabeth's coronation; note London skyline printed
along the bottom

London as entertainment and fashion center...remember searching
for these, Rachel?

We sort of sped through the last bits...one can only absorb so 
much...

Now outside, we walked past St. Paul's, and then to the river

And across the Millennial Bridge

Taking in the views and all the continuing new construction

Past The Globe, where we were groundlings on one visit

Attempted artsy-fartsy depiction

More growth and change and avant-garde architecture to rival
any other place we've seen

We had lunch in the shadow of the Tate Modern
(we visited a few days later); aka as the Bankside
Power Station

I love contrasts; here we are crossing the Blackfriars
Bridge; Queen Victoria and the Shard

Thus: another intense day!

Museum Of London, 1

We made it eventually to the Museum of London and spent most of the touring day there. It is a fine museum, particularly fine in the pre-historic and Roman bits, and provides a continuous and vivid picture of the history of this dynamic city. London is a city of museums, and much of what is at the city museum is on loan from elsewhere. There are riches to spare. And already there is planning for a new and larger city museum. Comparisons inevitably arise with Paris, and its Carnavalet. We saw the Carnavalet in 2014, also with Rachel (https://roadeveron.blogspot.com/2014/06/musee-carnavalet.html), one stop on a very busy day. It also is impressive, though in different ways. It occurs to me the two museums well reflect the two very different cities, the Carnavalet with far more paintings and sculptures and such, and a marvelous setting, itself historic, in the Hotel Carnavalet and the Hotel Peletier, in the Marais. Make of that what you will. Hopefully, we'll visit the Carnavalet again in a month or so.

Not sure what's in the black Camembert...most of the museum is

upstairs in adjacent buildings

Not so long ago, Britain was not an island; it was
part of Europe, the Thames a tributary of the Rhine;
wooly mammoths, rhinoceros, and other big game
roamed the land; here's a mammoth's foot bones

Temperature fluctuations over the past half 500,000 years; ice
ages, big melts, seas rising and falling; today we're in a melt,
and Britain is an island

Tools, stones and bones; humans have arrived

A large hall of pre-historic artifacts and displays

The kind of local construction the Romans found
when they arrived, 1st century BCE

Nice model of the port of Londinium in Roman times, roughly
the first four centuries CE

Helpful model of the Roman garrison

What a more prosperous Romano-Briton's living room might
have looked like

London, about 250 CE; the bridge across the Thames has been
in place for some time, but the city is already in decline

Out the window, bits of the old city wall, the lowest parts of which
are the Roman wall

A few centuries pass, London is nearly abandoned,
but then King Alfred rebuilds the city and calls it
"Lundenburg"

More centuries pass, the Normans are now firmly in control,
London is their capital, and they build the great St. Paul's
gothic church, modeled here; at the time one of the largest
churches in Christendom; destroyed in the Great Fire

Growing prosperity as the Middle Ages become the Renaissance;
here, a Wagon and Tun, 1554; the wagon crawled up and down 
the table, spraying rose water for dinner guests to wash their hands
with...

Model of The Rose, a theater of the Elizabeth Age

A map of the city before the Great Fire, in copper;
of 17 leaves, only three are known 

And they were used by Dutch painters...

Great St. Bart's

Our goal for the day, thank you, Rachel, was the Museum of London. Getting to it entailed some walking in The City and particularly some of its older precincts. One of the joys of touring, for us, is serendipity, getting off course, detours that lead to great things.

The Golden Boy of Pye is about the Great London
Fire (1665) and blame for it; needless to say, the
Protestants blamed the Catholics, and vice versa,
and many blamed the foreigners, and most blamed
the bakers, on whose street the fire began: hence,
the Golden Boy of Pye...and the Sin of Gluttony; I
have my own theory about the origin of The Fire
("follow the money") to be revealed in due course

Himself

The Fire notwithstanding, much older stuff is still around

Smithfield Meat Market

Somewhat off course, we enter the courtyard where William
Wallace was tortured and then executed...and should have been
for allowing himself to be portrayed by Mel Gibson

And then, ahead, the entrance to an obviously very old church

More of which; turned out to be Great St. Bart's, aka, the Priory
Church of St. Bartholomew the Great (there's a Lesser church
nearby)

The usual (thank you!) helpful signage; mostly about Prior Rahere,
founder of the church (see below)

Inside remains of the priory

Helpful image of St. Bartholomew, who, you 
will recall, was martyred by flaying (ouch!)

Helpful map of what remains of the church; 12th century, Norman,
did survive The Fire, but not Cromwell; rebuilt more than once in parts

Much going on in this church; here, a tomb of a plague victim;
"torn from service of state in prime by a disease as malignant as
the time..." The plague occurred mostly in 1665-1666, not a very
good year in London

Our Ben Franklin, himself

The Mary chapel, in the 18th, a print shop, where Franklin worked

Here's where it gets really interesting...Prior Rahere

was (accounts vary) a jester at the court of Henry I;

he was aboard the White Ship when it went down, 

carrying the heir (Pillars of the Earth fans and readers 

will know all about this); later, on a pilgrimage to Rome, 

he had a vision from St. Bart; persuaded Henry to support 

the priory church...

Prior Rahere's tomb; 12th century

Moving on to the church itself, some interesting
glass

Quire and organ; Cromwell's people destroyed the
nave

Chancel and elevation; thoroughly Norman, no
pointy stuff

Among other notables buried at Great St. Bart's,
Sir Walter Mildmay, an official of note who served 
under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I;
must have been a man of greatest diplomacy; and
flexibility

Back out in the courtyard, note how the tombstones have been
integrated into the contemporary buildings