On day 2 in London, we both had to start work after lunch, so we got up early and headed out for some sightseeing. We headed toward Bloomsbury, with a first stop in Leicester Square Garden, with a statue of William Shakespeare at the center.
Next we walked to Covent Garden and wandered into St Paul’s Church, known as the actors’ church. there are a lot of memorials to actors and people who were in theater. It’s very charming!
There is a practice or small replica theater inside that was really interesting. This model was used to supplement lectures about theater work and was very detailed.
After visiting the church we walked around the covent garden market area. This is where Eliza Doolittle ran into Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady!
We walked north toward Bloomsbury, going past a lot of sites near where I worked in the early 90s like the British museum and Russell square. We visited Tavistock Gardens, where there’s a bust of Virginia Woolf and others.
This very sweet cafe / kiosk was in nearby Gordon square.
We ran into Ghandi!
Earlier, along the way, we passed this really wonderful umbrella emporium. Great sign!
Near the British museum there were a number of really excellent galleries. We went into 2 that specialized in ceramics and saw some very stunning work. This piece is a long vessel with very thin walls.
In the same galley, these wall pieces were tiles I suppose, fired flat pieces that looked like paintings of vases but were all ceramic. So nice!
And these bottles remind me of the sensibility of potters Lucy Rie and Hans Coper, who were hugely influential on the uk pottery scene.
This was my office building in London, at 5 Gower Street!
We also visited the London Review of Books bookstore and had lunch at their cafe, eating in a lovely courtyard. It was getting hot and we needed to get to work so we walked back to the hotel. John went to the London office and I settled down in the hotel’s ‘office,’ beneath this inspirational message.
Work work work, then John came back to the hotel before his dinner plans and we went to a nearby bookstore, the oldest continually running bookstore in the UK, founded in 1797. But it’s a newbie compared to Ireland’s Hodges Figgis, founded in 1768!
Later that evening I went out for a quick stroll, and the area was buzzing with people. Here’s the Banksy sculpture at night, looking up toward Piccadilly Circus.
