The Cafe Royal has closed – a sad end to a great London institution.

Founded in 1865, the Cafe Royal was one of Oscar Wilde’s favourite hangouts. It hosted kings and princes, novelist Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger – as well as boxing matches. (That’s where the Marquis of Queensberry comes into the story – not only Oscar Wilde’s great antagonist, but the man who created the rules of modern boxing, the Queensberry Rules.)

But now this end of Regent Street is going to be redeveloped, and the Cafe Royal has got to go. It’s been sold to a developer who aims to turn the building into a five star hotel. (Not perhaps idée du jour for a recession?)

If you always wanted to see the Cafe Royal, but didn’t get round to it, you’ve missed it. But you might consider buying a bit of it instead. Auctioneer Bonhams will be selling the movables – cigar humidors, clocks, even the boxing ring and some amazing Venetian glass chandeliers. Bonhams estimates the boxing ring will fetch £5,000 – but you’ll need a big enough property to install it in.

Perhaps more realistic purchases might be the photographs of many of the celebrities who used the Cafe Royal, including Oscar (but of course), Vivien Leigh, and Winston Churchill, estimated at £200-300.

The sale will be on January 20th at Bonhams’ salerooms in Knightsbridge. Good luck if you’re bidding!

Photo credit: Charlie Brewer on flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

Charles Dickens features a graverobber, the nastily named Jeremy Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities. We actually see him digging up the coffin – so does his young son, who admits to his father that he wants to be a bodysnatcher when he grows up. Obviously readers of Dickens’s novels wouldn’t have thought this scene ridiculously far-fetched…

There aren’t too many reminders of the London bodysnatchers. But take yourself off to St Matthew’s church in Bethnal Green and you can see  a macabre reminder. At the corner of the road stands a watch house – dating from 1754. (It’s now on the corner of St Matthew’s Row and Wood Close).

The watchman was given a blunderbuss to defend the churchyard, with a reward of 2 guineas if he caught any bodysnatchers. Apparently the churchwardens still have the right to take a shot at you as long they give you warning – by sounding a sort of football rattle.

The watch house is a sweet little building, made of brick with contrasting white voussoirs of the two arches that contain the window and door of the ground floor. (Later, it was extended to house the parish fire engine.) But the innocent look of the building belies its macabre purpose.

Post from: The London Traveler

Westminster Cathedral is one of the great sights of London – in my book, anyway.

First of all, I’d better make sure no one confuses it with Westminster Abbey. The Abbey is where Kings, Queens, poets and the Establishment are buried; it’s a medieval building in the Gothic style, and an Anglican church. The Cathedral, on the other hand, is a Victorian building in neo-Byzantine style, and it’s a Roman Catholic church.

The foundation stone was laid in 1895. Architect JF Bentley didn’t choose the Gothic or classical styles that competed elsewhere in London for space – he looked to Byzantium and in particular to the great church of Hagia Sophia with its immense dome. Like the Byzantine churches, this one is mainly in brick – and brick that’s not hidden by stone cladding, but proudly proclaimed in the white-and-red decorative fabric of the great west front.

It’s a magnificent building, even though on a busy day it sometimes reminds me of a large railway station – there’s the same booming acoustic, the same to-ing and fro-ing, the same muted hum. It’s huge, for a start – 342 feet longm, 148 feet wide, with three great domes and using over 10 million bricks.

The other thing that rather puzzles me is why this cathedral looks so much like an Ottoman mosque. I know the Turks were much influenced by Hagia Sophia, so perhaps there’s a mutual influence there -  but the west front, with its little domed turrets cascading down from the great dome, really does look incredibly like one of the great mosques of Istanbul – Sultanahmet perhaps, or Suleymaniye. And the tower looks almost as much like a minaret as it does a Byzantine tower.

Whether it makes you think ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Byzantine’, there’s undeniably something exotic about this church.  You won’t find anything quite like it in London (though the Natural History Museum comes close.)

The interior is splendidly decorated with marble and mosaic. The marble used in the decoration comes from Greece, from Languedoc (the red), from Verona (the yellow),  and from Carrara in Italy (the capitals at the top of each column). The altar, on the other hand, is made out of Cornish granite – and apparently weighs ten tons.

Don’t miss the Stations of the Cross. They were carved by the great Eric Gill – a master stonemason and engraver. His work is clearly twentieth-century and yet it has something of the intensity and concentration of the best medieval art about it.  (His impassive, finely carved figures weren’t understood at the time when they were unveiled in 1915-16 – they were widely derided as flat and undevotional; it’s only later that Gill’s real artistic value was understood.)

Entrance to the cathedral is free, but there’s a charge to ascend the campanile – a marvellous red-and-white striped needle – for a marvellous view of London. And there is a lift – in case you were worried about your ability to manage all those steps.

The cathedral choir is also renowned, particularly for its performance of Spanish Renaissance music. The wonderful acoustic doesn’t hurt either. Go to choral vespers and it’s rumoured you won’t even have to sit through a sermon – just smells and bells and the most marvellous music.

Where: Victoria Street, SW1(Victoria tube station)

When: cathedral 7 am to 7pm, tower viewing gallery 930-1230 and 1-5pm.  Cathedral closes 530 pm on public holidays.

How much: cathedral free, admission charge for tower

Photo credit: Nick Richards on flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

I’m a big Ian McKellen fan. And his Richard III is, to my mind, one of the great Shakespearian performances.

But it’s also a wonderful guide to early 20th century building in London – the great days of Art Deco.

And what I think McKellen got absolutely right was the political ambivalence of this architecture. Take a good look at Shell  Mex House in the picture above – doesn’t it look just a bit like something by Albert Speer? The assertiveness of this architecture, its super-human scale, make it just that little bit totalitarian.

And certainly, when these buildings were put up, they were completely out of kilter with the fabric of little old London. They shocked.

In the film, we do see some earlier buildings too. Richard’s private cinema  is in fact the medieval great hall of Eltham Palace; and the Queen and her family take breakfast in what is really the undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn.

But it’s Art Deco that really stamps its style on the movie.  The old Pearl Assurance building, now the Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel, is more classical in style, but the Senate House of the University of London is full-on Art Dec. And it has a real Fascist background that makes its use in the film almost ironic – Oswald Moseley apparently planned to hold his Parliament here when he took power, and it’s said Hitler intended to do the same.

Other shots include Bankside Power  Station (aka Tate Modern), County Hall (the old one, not Ken’s curvaceous little number), St Pancras (a nod to the Victorian Gothic), and Horticultural Hall, Westminster – another striking piece of Art Deco design.

And the film ends with one of London’s great icons – Battersea Power Station providing the shell-trashed backdrop to a thoroughly modern war scene.

Even if you’re not normally the kind of person who’s into tracking down film locations, if you have the slightest interest in early 20c architecture in London, this film is well worth  seeing.

As usual, I got my info from Tony Reeves’ book Movie London.

Photo credit – Dave Mackay on Flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

You might know where Mornington Crescent is. It’s a tube station on the Northern Line, north of Euston.

The game involves each player naming a tube station, in turn. So it might go like this:

“Euston.”

“Morden.”

“Baron’s Court.”

“Cockfosters.”

“Mornington Crescent.”

And the first player to arrive at Mornington Crescent wins.

Now the confusing thing is the rules. There are all kinds of variants of the game. Trumpington Variations, for example. Or the Tudor Court Rules. Or Reverse Bidding, or the East Anglian variation.

You can object to other players’ tube stations for all kinds of reasons. And you can play various strategies, like the ‘Hamersmith jink’. But the real joke is that the ground rules are never explained, and indeed some people doubt that they exist.  (Which rather reminds me of the British class system…)

The game became so much a part of London culture that when satirist Willie Rushton, an expert player, died, a blue plaque was put up at Mornington Crescent station.

And you can play it with Paris metro stations, for instance. Or even with Moscow metro stations – there are Russian players!

But it’s the London game which is the original – and if you’re ever homesick for London, just listen to the clip of the game on the BBC website.

Photo credit – JB Parker on Flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

But here’s a great one. A ghost chicken.

Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, was an early scientist -  back in Shakespeare’s day. He was a real live wire, always experimenting with new things.  Coming back through Highgate in the snow, he had a bright idea; frozen chicken.  So he got his manservant to go and get a chicken; gutted it, plucked it, and shoved its cavity full of snow instead of stuffing.

Apparently there have been reports of an almost featherless, very poorly ghost chicken running around Pond Square in Highgate!  The poor bird was running round in circles, in a  flap. (It hasn’t been seen for years, though, as far as I can find out. So you might not be lucky if you go ghost-hunting in Pond Square.)

The strangest thing is that there should really be two ghosts in this story. Because by the time Bacon had finished stuffing the chicken with snow, he’d caught a sniffle. He died not long after.

Post from: The London Traveler

It’s not always innocent. “Pop goes the weasel” is a song about poverty – and it can be very precisely located in North London.

Up and down the city road,

In and out the Eagle,

That’s the way the money goes,

Pop! goes the weasel.

Well the City Road is in Islington. And the Eagle is a well known pub on City Road. So ‘That’s the way the money goes’ – spending it on beer and, probably, gambling. Or, possibly, women.

As for the weasel going ‘pop’ – well, ‘popping’ a thing meant taking it to the  pawnbroker’s as security for a loan till the end of the week, when you were short of ready cash. Again, it’s a song about money. And the weasel? Weasel and stoat – coat, a little piece of Cockney rhyming slang.

Post from: The London Traveler

Many of the best museums – including the biggest ones – are free, and so is one of my favourites, the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

If you want to go to Evensong or one of the Sunday services in Westminster Abbey, it’s free – and that’s a big saving as otherwise it’s £12 to get in, which even for such a historic building seems a bit much. Okay, you won’t be able to look around all that much, but none the less, if you just want to get a feel for the place, it’s worth considering. The choir isn’t bad either.

And  there are lots of free concerts, particularly at lunchtime. In the City, St Margaret’s Lothbury and St Anne and St Agnes on Gresham Street do fine lunchtimeconcerts of classical music, and the Royal Opera House has free gigs on Monday lunchtimes.

If you’re a really determined cheapskate you should also visit the London is free website,  which has a useful calendar of free events coming up in the next few weeks.

Post from: The London Traveler

But if you look at a map, you can detect the medieval past in the twistiness of the streets, the absence of straight lines (and many that do exist, like Queen Victoria Street, are post-medieval), and above all, the street names.

Cheapside comes from the old English word ‘to cheapen’, meaning to bargain or to buy. It was the main market street, therefore – the place where things could be bought.

And you’ll see all around it streets with names that remind you of what was sold there – Bread Street, Milk Street, Honey Lane. In the medieval market each trade had its own alleyway, just as they do in the Arab souk or in Istanbul’s bazaar today.

And the last little bit of Cheapside before it meets the junction at Bank is called Poultry. You can easily guess what was sold there!

Photo credit – Steve Cadman on Flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

Unexploded bombs have disrupted London’s transport today. London City Airport has been closed to traffic, since an unexploded bomb has been found on the Olympics site.

Meanwhile, another UXB at Bromley-by-Bow stopped the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines last night.

We seem to be having a spate of UXBs at the moment – a mine was found near Felixstowe recently, and towed out to sea by the Navy before being destroyed. Here’s the official report, with some good pictures.

I wonder how many more UXBs there are in London? It was pretty extensively bombed, particularly on the east side where the docks were a prime target for the Luftwaffe. There could be many more lurking. And there are certainly enough that we do know about, according to this list.

Post from: The London Traveler