London pride

[shewhomust]

For a long time, London was somewhere we had to visit because we had family there; it wasn't somewhere I particularly enjoyed going. Somewhere in the past few years, that has changed: the main point of going to London is still to see friends and family, but now I enjoy the city for itself as well. I still wouldn't want to live there: I've done that, and paid my dues, and don't need to do it again. And I wouldn't want to be a serious tourist in London either - so many major monuments, so many miles of streets between them. But catching sight of the Tower just because the most practical route from one visit to the next takes you over Tower Bridge, that's magical. As are the details, the glimpses, the statues and quirks and "smaller" museums...

Last week we went to Dulwich, and its Picture Gallery, and to the Geffrye Museum; and just walked around and looked about us. I love the approach of Smoke magazine, its articles about bus routes and lost rivers, its clever-dick sense of humour.

There's a whole web site about public lettering in London - and a Flickr group on the same subject.

And another Flickr group, the London Book dedicated to all the details of London architecture. Wonderful stuff.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I love the Geffrye Museum! Do they still have the rats with the glowing eyes on the old Tudor staircase?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

The Geffrye is nor as I remember it: but since I'm remembering back over the best part of a half-century (ouch!) I'm not sure how much of that is them, and how much is me. I saw no rats, no old staircases and (since the first room is now set up as "A Hall in 1630") no Tudors.

They seem to have shifted from showing the homes of "ordinary" people to how your home might look if you were rather well off and keen to keep up to date. There's a certain logic in that (if you set up a room with the available furniture of 1630, that's probably who it would have belonged to) but I found it alienating, too. Interesting, but less satisfying than I remember.