Help with mystery buildings?

I'm sorting through my hundreds of London photos, which is a really, really, fun "job." And I'm having pretty good luck—by using my London map, my bus map, the internet and clues from within the pictures themselves—identifying even the generic street scenes as to locations. Not only is this a very enjoyable activity, but I want to pursue due diligence in making the eventual captions that will describe the photos as accurate as possible.

Which brings me to a few mystery buildings that have cropped up so far (I'm only a little over 1/3 of the way through, so there will probably be more questions to come.) If anyone's still reading this blog and can help me with identifications and/or locations for these structures, I'd really appreciate it.

I'll show you what's probably the easiest one first. This is the very attractive building on your right as you face the entrance to Westminster Abbey. Google Maps calls it the Dean's Yard, and that might be right, but my son and I both remember something about its being some sort of ecclesiastical housing. Does it have a different name? The Abbey brochure (and the website, as far as I could tell) doesn't tell you what it is.

Now for one that's a little harder. I think it might be in or near Whitehall. In my sequence of photos, it was in between one taken on the Jubilee footbridge and one of the Admiralty Arch. Any ideas? Bonus kudos for id'ing the green-roofed building in the background.

These last two might be pretty tough. I don't have a memory of where these were taken, and their place in that day's sequence doesn't help much. They were taken one after the other, after one showing the steeple of the Royal Courts of Justice framed in trees, which might have been taken on the Victoria Embankment looking up a side street (I know we weren't actually on the Strand; the Courts steeple shot is from a distance.)

Unfortunately, I don't know if these pictures were taken from near the river, too, or from the bus ride home (although they don't look like through the window shots) or from somewhere near my flat (in Chelsea). The first one doesn't look like Chelsea to me, though. Do they look familiar to anyone?

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Thanks for any help y'all can give me!

London mementos

[Note: I was working on this post a week or so ago, but then other ideas—see below—presented themselves. Thanks to Henry for showing me how to alter the posting date and get this in the right place—what a neat trick!]

It's a little late, but I finally took all my memento ticket stubs out and put them on my souvenirs quilt, right next to my desk, where I can travel down memory lane any time I want.

Here's a picture of the quilt. If you click on the image, you can see a much larger version.


And here's a list of the London items, with links to the blog post where I talked about the event. How many can you find?

• Spamalot ticket
  
• representative generic train ticket (this one was to Whittlesford, closest stop to Duxford)
  
• Fulham football game
  
• Queen's Park Rangers football game ticket
  
• Darwin exhibit in Natural History Museum ticket
  
• St. Martin in the Fields Mozart concert ticket
• Imperial War Museum, Duxford ticket
• St. Paul's Cathedral ticket
• Westminster Abbey ticket
• London Wasps rugby game ticket
  
• Tate Modern Rothko exhibit ticket
  
• Courtauld Museum ticket
  
• visitor's badge for Houses of Parliament
• Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms ticket
  
• We Will Rock You ticket
  
• Tower of London ticket
  
• V&A Cold War Modern exhibit ticket
  
• Tageskarte (day ticket) for Potsdam/Berlin transportation (not exactly London, but it was on the trip)

Note that almost all of the items were for attractions I (or someone) paid for. All those free museum trips didn't generate ticket stubs.

Stumped? Here's a key, with the items as listed above noted in alphabetical order:


If you're curious about any of the other items on the quilt (some of them have some historical interest, and almost all come with a story), let me know in the comments.

Adeus, Felipão...

I'm beginning to think I called this blog closed a little early. I keep coming up with ideas to post.

Like yesterday, when I got in the car to drive home from work and heard that Big Phil had been sacked as Chelsea's manager! I couldn't help but think of the picture I took on the left last October. The very large sign was on the wall above a Brazilian restaurant near Chelsea's home ground, which is also near where I lived. I wonder how the the restaurant folks feel about fellow Brasileiro Phil Scolari now.

Ah, well, being the manager of a top flight English soccer team has to be one of the least secure jobs in the world. Especially at a club like Chelsea that has a lot of really high-paid players and doesn't like being stuck in fourth place in the league. I rather expect the nil-nil draw with Hull last weekend was the last straw.

I was a follower of English soccer before my trip to London, but now, with that experience behind me, the European soccer news I get here has a special poignance. It was pretty cool to open my windows and hear the cheering from Stamford Bridge on game nights!

Punting on the.... San Marcos?

A very odd sight greeted our group of conventional kayakers yesterday as we started out on a short ride down the San Marcos River from near Pecan Park. There was a group of canoeists coming toward us upstream. But the upstream wasn't the crazy part—they were standing in their boats and using long poles instead of paddles to propel themselves.

It was a party of experienced and novice punting enthusiasts! Rather a long way from the Cam and the Isis, but punting all the same!

It was a large group, more than the 4 you can see in this picture. And the kayakers, a few of which you can see on the left above, were numerous, too, taking advantage of the spring-like weather. [You can see more about our day on the river, and afterwards, in a post on my Hometown Tourist blog.]

Punting! Just another example of the world-wide reach of British culture, I suppose, and another reminder here in Texas, however odd and unexpected, of my wonderful English sojourn.

Let's hear it for National Rail Services!

We had a bit of merrie olde England visit us at home in Texas the other day.

When Henry visited Norwich on a family history quest in November, the train he took was delayed on the way there, and he was told to make a request at the station for a partial refund of his ticket. (His experience at the station actually led to more connections with his family history in Norwich, as you can see by reading the blog entry linked above.) And, good to their word, we got the pictured check for £12 in the mail, a few days after getting a very polite (of course!) letter telling us to expect the check and apologizing for the inconvenience of the delayed train.

I loved the trips I took on National Rail while I was in the UK (see the "trains" label at the right). My trains were all on time, it was easy to know when to get off (a major concern of Americans like me unused to public transport), staff was always helpful at the ticket windows and on the coaches, and the accommodations were comfortable and well-equipped—you can't get better than wifi on the train!

And it seems they aren't just nice when you're there in front of them, but even after you're all the way across the ocean. Now, we just have to figure out how to get a check made out in pounds into our bank account!

Favorite Fotos: London panoramas

This will be my last post on this blog, for a while at least. I feel like I need to let my London experience percolate a bit before I start on the big project I've always planned for these photos—an addition to my website similar to those I've constructed for some of our previous trips (although it will be much larger).

I've found, though, that I can't bear the thought of not blogging, and so I've started a new blog that I'll tell you more about at the end of this post.

But for now, I thought it would be a fitting finale to the Favorite Fotos (not to mention alliterative!) to display some of my favorite panoramic shots of London, starting with this one from the top (or as close as you can get) of St. Paul's:


You're looking back upstream from here, and can get a good idea of how twisty the Thames is, since you know that the London Eye and the Victoria Tower of the Houses of Parliament are on the bank, and yet don't look like it in this shot.

Looking another direction from the top of St. Paul's shows how very urban London is—buildings, buildings, buildings, as far as the eye can see, with the BT tower standing out as it often does.


Here's another church-top shot, this time from Westminster Cathedral. It's not as tall as St. Paul's, but certainly offers a good view (for a fraction of the price, by the way) of many London landmarks. How many of these can you spot? Victoria Tower, London Eye, St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey, Canary Wharf....


It's pretty amazing to realize that you can see the Eye from so many places around London. Here's a scene that's not too surprising, since you're just a ways upstream from Lambeth Bridge...


.... but here it is peeping over some government buildings visible at the other end of the lake in St. James' Park, which makes for something of an unexpected vista:


London being as flat as it is, you can't really get panoramic views without going up in buildings like St. Paul's and the Cathedral, the only exception I know of being the hilltop in Hampstead Heath Park. Which gives you a different angle altogether, as you can see here:


I decided not to venture further from London than this next photo, rather than include panoramas from my trips to Scotland, Wales, Italy and Germany. But Greenwich is really part of London, and the buildings on the other side of the river certainly are. The closer, older structures are part of the Naval College at Greenwich, and the snazzy new high-rises across the river are Canary Wharf, an obviously booming area (note the large number of construction cranes). The picture was taken from the top of the Naval Observatory hill, where Greenwich Mean Time is recorded—otherwise known as the center of the universe!


And here's a fitting final shot, sunset from the Millennium Footbridge that connects St. Paul's with the Tate Modern and points south. You see part of the Eye from here, too!


So I'm saying good-bye to London posts for a while, but do hope to get to work on my big web project before too much of 2009 is behind us. And I might, from time to time as something reminds me of my time in London and gives me an idea for a post, add to this blog.

In the meantime, though, take a look at my new blog, which I'm calling "Hometown Tourist." [Note that the url is kathyamen.blogspot.com, since hometowntourist was taken as a blogspot label; but I really like the title and didn't want to have to change it.] It will mostly feature scenes of South Texas, but I do have plans for trips to New York City, Tampa, Florida, and Colorado in the works for later in the year, so reflections and photos from other locales I happen to visit will spice things up a bit.

Cheerio! and thanks for reading!

Favorite Fotos: finishing up the signs

Just a few more miscellaneous interesting sign photos in the folder, including the one at the right, taken, I believe, near the Tower. I did see a few similar receptacles in other locales, but not as many as I'd put up if I were in charge of city streets. One of my biggest pet peeves is discarded gum on the sidewalk. Tossed-away butts are bad, too, but at least they don't stick to your shoes.

Moving on to another, unrelated (I said this collection was miscellaneous) sign seen near a pond at Hampstead Heath. There are so many interesting things about this notice—men only? why? are they the only people crazy enough to go swimming (in the winter) in water that's untreated, opaque and cold? (characteristics which apparently have their own graphic symbol) how, exactly does one properly go about summoning a lifeguard in case of an emergency?


The sign on the left was posted inside the ladies' loo at Westminster Cathedral. The toilets are located in the Cathedral Kitchen, which is a cafe, not an actual kitchen.

It expresses the fervent hopes of users of public toilets everywhere, doesn't it? And, for the most part, the public loos in the UK, whose praises I'm sure I've sung on earlier occasions in the blog, were left in a very fit state. Hardly, hardly ever out of paper, and usually with both warm water and soap in abundance. What a wonderful civilization, that can provide such facilities!

I have nothing but compliments for Londoners and British people in general, based on my encounters. And though, because of the spelling, I feel this isn't exactly what's meant by the sign below (from what I could gather on the internet, I think it has something to do with alternative medicine), I still thought the wording was very apt:


The sign below I had to snap, given the large numbers of engineers I have as friends and relatives. And I know how easily distractable they are! The door leads to one of the restoration hangars at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.


Now, it seems that the logic of this post, not much to start with, is really falling apart, so I'll close with this sign from a street in Oxford.

It happens that I am finding less logic for this entire blog, as well. I plan to post a finale collection of views of London sometime this week, then at least temporarily sign off Bridges to London. I've definitely gotten the blogging bug, though, and will let my countless (?!) loyal readers know when my new blog is ready for prime time, hopefully also later this week.