Trafalgar Square and the Temple Church

Trafalgar Square

Lord Nelson’s statue looms in the center of Trafalgar Square (and his portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery) and Lord Nelson stands on top of a huge phallic column. Did I say phallic? I meant to say Neoclassical. Yeah. But anyway, Neil Gaiman mentions it in Neverwhere:

Richard was not an enthusiastic holder of pigeons, even at the best of
times. “I don’t see the point in this,” he said. “I mean, it’s not a homing
pigeon. It’s just a normal London pigeon. The kind that craps on Lord
Nelson (p. 39).”

National Gallery

This large Neoclassical building has a lot of Renaissance art with Madonnas and such, and it has a really famous 16th century painting that shows a couple of ambassadors with a table between them with lots of stuff on it—it’s by Hans Holbein the younger and it’s called French Ambassadors. I’m sure I have at least one art book containing this picture. If you stand on the right side of the painting, you can see that the weird whitish thing in the center bottom of the painting is actually a big skull, representing death. It was painted at this strange optical illusion sort of angle. (In the National Portrait Gallery, in the section with royalty, there’s a long weird painting of Edward VI that is meant to be seen through some sort of device that unfortunately has been lost, so all you can look at is this elongated, warped view of the little prince’s head on a wooden panel.) I saw some other early stuff and had to take a break from it and headed for nineteenth century paintings (I don’t think there’s any sculpture there, only paintings, and I’m lately more in the mood to make sculptures myself), and the newest painting I actually came across in this building was Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. It was also, I think, my favorite. But of course, I was going through it all very fast, since Sally and I would be meeting up at a certain time, so that we could go to the National Portrait Gallery the same day. She had mentioned before we went that paintings tend to blur together for her—she doesn’t enjoy them half as much as I do, since she’s not a visual artist but a performer.

An interesting, or perhaps not so interesting, detail: some crosswalks have, instead of white lines painted on the pavement, square metal things, about 4” x 4,” in two rows crossing the street, thus creating the crosswalk.

I’ve noticed that the sun is already almost up around, say, 4 am—making we feel like I slept through the alarm clock—and that even when we’ve stepped out of the theatre, such as the Globe, at about 10 pm, the sun hasn’t completely set—the sky is distinctly blue or purple. It probably has to do with how far north England is (that was Sally’s idea), plus this is summertime.

But anyway, back to Trafalgar Square….

National Portrait Gallery

I went through an exhibit of portraits (some paintings or drawings, more photos) of women explorers. I jotted down some of their names on the brochure with the idea of looking them up and learning more about them.

I believe this was the building that houses a huge, life-size portrait of a horse. Yes, a horse. In the early nineteenth century, an aristocrat was very fond of an impressive horse and hired a painter to paint a portrait. Apparently it’s one of the more popular paintings in the gallery, because there were prints and stationery of it in the gift shop.

I particularly looked around at some early nineteenth century portraits, many of which I recognized from books—Jane Austen (a drawing of her by her sister), Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Lady Caroline Lamb, the Prince Regent and his unhappy wife Catherine (I think that’s her name—I’m so bad with names), etc. And there was a large white marble sculpture in the center of a room, and it had busts of many people attached to the same base.

Just about every building, even the New Globe, has bright kelly green exit signs with a glowing white stick figure running, sometimes over a simple flight of stairs outline.


Temple Church

We left the Tube station and went to the Victoria Embankment, where we turned left (crossing the street) and soon came upon these two silver dragon statues on pedestals, on either side of the street, that according to the plaque mark the original western border of the city of London. We wandered down the Embankment and came to great black iron gates on our left, and went up this long and winding brick road, surrounded by tall, old buildings—and the buildings—probably dating to the 18th century--were up close to the street, so that there was no grass; also, the street sloped uphill and the scenery looked like something out of a fairy tale. It would make a good setting for a Tim Burton film. Sally wasn’t even sure if we were supposed to go beyond the gate, it was such a hushed and official-feeling area. The buildings were stone or brick, and at the porticos, next to the front doors, were long lists of names, that gave the title of the people who worked in these offices—Mr., Ms., or Lord and Lady. These were off-white card-like plaques, in flowing black script. It seems that law offices surrounded us, and indeed we were passed by official-looking people wearing black suits. Rather odd place for a misfit Bohemian artist like myself. We kept wandering and following the little brown signs, up on metal poles, pointing in the direction of the Temple Church.

Suddenly we came to a brick courtyard and saw the Temple Church. It was quite striking, this very old church (at least 1300s) in a small brick courtyard and surrounded by buildings from the eightheen and nineteenth centuries, again mostly brick and Neoclassic.

The church includes a long rectangular part, though even with that it’s much smaller and less ornate than most gothic churches. I immediately spotted the most important part of the church: the front end (nave) is a perfect circle, or perhaps I should say cylinder, “theatre in the round,” like how a coven at a Sabbat forms a circle. That is, it’s such an early Christian church that it still has a strong Pagan influence. That’s how you know it’s a truly old church, not just from the eroded stone faces and gargoyles on the façade. Around this circle, inside, arches with little faces above them hover a couple feet above my head, I’d estimate; and a stone bench circles all the way around. This circular section includes about eight extremely old effigies that were actually down on the floor, on rectangles just a few inches high rather than raised on coffin-like boxes as we saw at Westminster Abbey. Most of these effigies (all of which are knights) date back to the 1200s, and though they have wooden labels on them, most of them were of “An Unidentified Knight,” and were somewhat eroded. Except for the bits of London wall we’ve seen, Cleopatra’s Needle, and small things on exhibit inside museums (such as ancient Roman statuary), these effigies must have been the oldest things we saw on this trip, and the Temple Church must have been the oldest building into which we set foot.

Continuing with the theme of: It’s our last day and we haven’t been to this, this, and this—we took the Tube to Tower Hill Station and again ended up at the Tower of London, but also at a chunk of the London Wall that somehow I didn’t recall seeing before, I think because it was to the left after we got out of the station, rather than forward. It was a pretty big chunk, with even some vestige of a tower and window from the thirteenth century.

We followed a path toward the Tower Bridge, gazing at the Tower of London while we walked. However, we were very footsore and it was raining by now, so we didn’t really feel like getting closer than the end of this path, from which we could clearly see the bridge. So we got on the Tube again and stopped at Baker Street, and we went to Boots for sandwiches and in my case also for tissues. We ate in my room and went to the other hostel to get our deposit. We’ll just drop off our keys at this building tomorrow morning, when we leave.

Regent's Park

After dinner, we finally took a walk in Regents Park, which is right behind our hostel. Oh, my, it’s definitely worthwhile! We came to ponds, swans, weeping willows drooping over the water, a little island with bridges and waterfalls—it’s beautiful. One arched bridge, surrounded by weeping willows and other lush vegetation (and did I mention lots and lots of flowers are in this park?) reminded me of some paintings by Monet, that he painted at Giverny. We wandered around the pond for a while, and at one point we sat down on a park bench and a pair of pigeons started caressing each other and having sex on a low branch right in front of us, but we laughed so loud they flew off. That’s one way to keep down the pigeon population. Also, Regents College is in this park, and apparently it’s affiliated with Webster University—I’ll have to look into that. Hmmm. I certainly came to the conclusion that I’d like to come back, stay in the same hostel, and spend more time in Regents Park.

At some point, I checked the map of London and discovered that Abbey Road is within walking distance from our hostel, but I suspected it would be a longish and footsore walk just to see a plain crosswalk, so we skipped that idea. Maybe on my next visit.