i am sparticus: London Tourism Day Three

London Tourism Day Three

So, today brings more tourism and my witty recounts of London thereby revealed by it. Or something, I remain sorely unconvinced that that last sentence made any sense whatsoever, nor on balance, this one. Gosh this is the worst start to someone's website I've ever written in a long time. On with the tourism!

Four jumpers, one ball and a bunch of people. That's all you need.

Last week I cut short my visit to the country-running end of Westminster¹ so I figured that this would be a good as place to start as any other, that and I had a meeting in The Strand² last week and the area around there looked worth a visit.

If you arrive through the Westminster underground, the first thing you notice is that just in front of you are views of the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Chapel, The London Eye, Big Ben and Westminster Bridge that are all obscured by thousands of tourists. Now, I can't really feel angry about this seeing as I am one of them but it does spoil the opportunity to get many great photographs. Also it's harder to think of witty comments to write on your website when you're being constantly jostled in seven different languages. Hooray for whoever laid out the roads around Parliamentary Square then!

Parliamentary Square is the square that sits in between Whitechapel, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. It's green and square like, contains lots of statues and due to some management / design type fluke it's completely inaccessible to the public unless you want to run across at least four lanes of traffic. If you've ever travelled to a major city abroad and been confused by the local traffic system then you'll understand why with a thousand tourists milling around there were just ten people sitting in Parliamentary Square. Nine of the ten people were all looking rather smug and eating their lunch, the tenth was a Japanese gentleman who looked rather distressed and was trying to eat his camera³. It's almost a shame that the square is so inaccessible because it's full of statues of really interesting famous people. Like Churchill and Ian Christian Smuts, Viscount Palmepston, Derby, Beaconsfield and Peel. The last one was actually on a pedestal that was revolving at around 33rpm, but I think it would have sounded better at 45rpm. And so with two badly thought out jokes written in my head I left Parliamentary Square and proceeded over Westminster Bridge to the South Bank.

Rather obviously The South Bank is the name for the Southern bank of the Thames, generally the area's restricted to the bit between Lambeth Bridge and London Bridge or Tower Bridge. It's quite artsy and pretentious, but quite enjoyable too. Some quick notes on various things on that side of the river.

• Lambeth Palace is the house of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England⁴. It's a rather out of place building and it seems rather daunting and inaccessible, I certainly couldn't see an obvious way in. So uncharacteristic of the Church of England.

• The BA Eye is remarkably impressive. I'm sure I'll go on it soon and let you know how it goes then.

• There are lots of street performers on the wide boulevard between Westminster Bridge and the London Eye, some are quite interesting and try and grab the audiences' attention with clever ideas. A large percentage of them though just spray-paint themselves silver or gold and then pretend to be statues that only move when money is put into their tip jar, effectively making them really lazy mime artists. Has no-one ever told them that statues as a fairly universal rule don't move when paid and that also, generally speaking, statues aren't made out of silver or gold but stone? And also has anyone told them that, as a golden law inshrined in the head of everyone good and true, mime artistry is the most vicious and evil way of earning a living outside of professionally drowning puppies?

Next week: London's worst jobs!

¹ Westminster isn't just the parliamentary/state type bit, it's the name for one of the two city's that exist inside London, the other is helpfully called 'The City'. For practicality's sake it's treated like most other boroughs of London which are much like counties in the rest of the country (The City is different though, it is treated as practically autonomous from the rest of London). Westminster borders the Thames on the South East edge, and runs from the West End in the East to the Eastern half of Hyde Park in the West. Confused?

² On that list of places to visit I've got Vine Street, Bow Street and Pentonville Road left and then, hotels on everything!

³ I joke! Realistically he could have been from anywhere in East Asia.

⁴ Technically the Queen is the head of the Church of England, but you know what I mean. Well, really technically, God is, but you know what I mean.

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