August 2024

An addition to yesterday’s post – we had diner in the Old Bank of England building then saw a hilarious play – “The Play That Goes Wrong” which has been running for ten years in the theater district.

Last day in London, tomorrow we fly back home. Today we started at Buckingham Palace then headed to Tower Bridge and our final stop, The Tower of London.

Buckingham Palace is recognized around the world as the home of the monarch, the focus of national and royal celebrations, as well as the backdrop to the regular Changing of the Guard ceremony. Clearly the most elaborate palace we visited during our trip. No photographs are allowed in the interior – a good overview is at (https://www.rct.uk/visit/buckingham-palace).

Tower Bridge was opened to the public in 1894. When compared with its neighbor – the Tower of London (built in the 11th century) – it is rather young! The Bridge may appear to be a stone castle-like structure, but its design was chosen so that it complemented the White Tower, in the Tower of London complex. These style additions were used as an artistic flourish to cover the real structure of Tower Bridge, which is a solid steel frame.

Tower of London – William the Conqueror built a mighty stone tower at the center of his London fortress in the 1070s (the White Tower). Now, nearly 1000 years later, the Tower still has the capacity to fascinate and horrify. It is the protector of the Crown Jewels (no photos), home of the Yeoman Warders and its legendary guardians, the pampered ravens. It was a secure fortress, a royal palace, and an infamous prison. The Tower also has a richer and more complex history, having been home to a wide array of institutions including the Royal Mint, the Royal Armories, and even a zoo.

Buckingham Palace area

Tower Bridge

Tower of London

Thanks for riding along on our adventure. Feel free to pass the links along to your friends.

We returned to London a little bit sleepy from our overnight train ride from Edinburgh but were able to drop our luggage off at our hotel and headed off to see the “Churchill War Rooms”. We walked from our hotel past the Church of England Headquarters, Westminster Abbey, the Methodist Church of England, Whitehall buildings and the Parade grounds. The Cabinet War Rooms provided the secret underground headquarters for the core of the British government throughout the Second World War.

The fear that London would be the target of aerial bombardment had troubled the government since the First World War, and in 1938, the basement of a Whitehall building was chosen as the site for the Cabinet War Rooms. From 1940 to 1945, hundreds of men and women would spend thousands of vital hours here, and it soon became the inner sanctum of the British government. Following the surrender of the Japanese Forces, the doors to the Cabinet War Rooms were locked on 16 August 1945, and the complex was left undisturbed until Parliament ensured its preservation as a historic site in 1948. Knowledge of the site and access to it remained highly restricted until the late 1970s when the Imperial War Museum began the task of preserving the site and its contents, making them accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In 1984, the main war rooms opened to the public. In 2003, further restoration work opened the ‘Courtyard Rooms,’ the rooms where staff would eat, sleep, and work in safety.

In 2005 they added the only major museum in the world dedicated to Sir Winston Churchill. Its multimedia and uniquely engaging approach provide visitors with a comprehensive overview of Churchill’s life.

Photography was permitted but I refrained and concentrated on the venue and the Churchill Museum. You can get a feel of the faciity by viewing: https://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms/about

In the afternoon, we headed over to the British Museum, which we missed on our planned first day as our original flight was cancelled. Not having the time we wanted, we just viewed the museum’s highlights.

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art, and culture. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge. The museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum’s expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonization and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. The right to ownership of some of its most well-known acquisitions, notably the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, is subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims. Some of the displayed objects we were able to see included: Tang dynasty figures, the Rosetta Stone, and the Hoa Hakananai’a – A colossal ancestor figure from Rapa Nui/Easter Island.

To the Churchilll War Rooms